Summer Classes For Visiting Students

(Posted by Courtney, CRMS class of 2010) - And I thought I spent too much time at school during the year! For the second year, I'm spending five weeks of my summer with the coolest kids I've ever met. They're in a program called HS2, and are inner city kids at the top of their class. And they came to LEARN! In summer! It's great to be around such motivated kids.

I'm lucky enough to help Kayo, Michael, and Gretchen in the classroom with biology and chemistry classes. We just wrapped up a week-long unit on water ecology. In conjunction with the Roaring Fork Conservancy, HS2 students and CRMS students have been monitoring Cattle Creek. The biology students looked at macro-invertebrates (bugs!) and the chemistry class looked at hardness, alkalinity, dissolved oxygen, pH, and flow. It was so funny to see everyone wearily eye the water, until they finally were jumping in by the last testing site. The biology class caught a snake and kept it as a pet, too. It was too bad we had to let him go. They finished up the unit on Tuesday night by giving very solid PowerPoint presentations to each other about their results and conclusions about the health of the Creek.

I'm excited for the week to come. Hopefully, the biology class will have some eggs to raise tomorrow. We're breeding Zebrafish to illustrate Mendelain genetics. The chemistry kids are going to make some soap. We'll see how it goes!