My students need prisms and color demonstration materials to truly understand the science of light and how white light is made up of the colors of the spectrum.
As my class began studying light and color, I was surprised to learn that no one had explored prisms and made rainbows appear. Explaining how the spectrum works so that my students can really understand it has been very difficult without hands on materials with which my students can explore.
I have a wonderful group of ethnically and socioeconomically diverse students who come from all over our very large city.
Our school is a special and unique place in which students learn by building, creating, exploring, questioning and doing projects. In my class, for example, one of our big projects is to build a small scale city of the future. My students spend the year learning about things that will help them create the city of their dreams. My kids love to learn and are very interested in the world around them, but the ever-shrinking budget is increasingly limiting what we are able to do. It is very hard to have my students explore and experiment without the materials and resources we need to do so.
My Project
There is really nothing like discovering and exploring science concepts for yourself. To truly understand how the world around them works, my students need to question, to experiment, and to learn by doing. These materials will allow my students to come to a deeper understanding of how light works. They will be able to take prisms out onto the school yard and make rainbows out of sunlight. We will then be able to use the laser guided prism to actually see how the beams of light are refracted, separating out the different colors in the spectrum. The color wheel will let them explore how the colors of the spectrum are combined to create white. The color mixing machine will make it visible, and understandable, that the primary colors of light are not the same as the primary colors of paint. I can't wait to see their faces when they can actually see for themselves that mixing red and green light gives you yellow!
We are currently preparing students for jobs that we don't know about, jobs that don't yet exist.
The basic skills our students need go far beyond paper and pencil tasks; they need to be able to communicate, to question, to envision, to explore and find answers to important questions. Science is a wonderful pathway to developing these skills and this project will help my students take important steps towards preparing them for their futures.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Mrs. Benjamin and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.