Charter School shows its stuff
By Bobbi Mlynar
Originally published 01:55 p.m., April 22, 2008
Updated 01:55 p.m., April 22, 2008
Prospective students at Turning Point Learning Center crawled inside an animal cell Monday evening and got a lesson in how cells function while their parents talked with teachers and parents about the ways education can be delivered through the school.
The activity was one of several underway at the school to showcase its face-to-face classes and its online school, and to attract new students.
Turning Point is staffed and operated by ESSDACK, a Hutchinson-based educational group granted a contract to run the charter school on behalf of the school district.
The school is located at the old Kansas Avenue school building, 315 S. Market St.
Students Lauren Harrell and Nick DeBauge led the tours of the room-sized cell, which was built by students in the classroom.
The cell membrane, made of a clear plastic material and kept inflated by a fan, held the parts of an animal cell, from the nucleus to the mitochondrion. The students had made it from scraps of materials available.
The cell has been taken around the Emporia school district this semester to give interactive lessons to other students. It’s a bit of a chore to remove all of the parts, box them up and haul them to other venues, but the students like sharing their work and their knowledge with other youngsters.
“We don’t take the nucleus out,” Nick said. “It’s too heavy. It tears the door up and that’s happened too many times.”
On Wednesday, Lauren and Nick talked to prospective Turning Point students about the elements of the cell and how each functions in cooperation with the others.
“We try to give examples of how they work in the cells,” Nick said.
“And we tried to get them proportioned correctly,” Lauren added.
The cell evolved from science classes based on systems of the body. From the overall body, students moved on to organs and down to individual cells. Now, the fifth- through eighth-grade youngsters served at Turning Point are studying genetics.
Outside the cell, refreshments were available near rows of science projects on display. Aromachology, crystal growth, water and other topics had piqued the interest of the students.
Slices of bread inside individual plastic bags showed molds of a variety of colors and textures — red, black, chartreuse and a vivid yellow. Each mold had been grown from samples captured on common surfaces, such as a toilet, a guinea pig café and the banister between the first and second floor.
Face-to-face teacher Ginger Lewman said the youngsters had guessed that the samples from the toilet or the cage would be the first to mold.
“It was the banister,” Lewman said, swiping her hand under her nose to illustrate a major factor in the result.
route12 (anonymous) says...
This is all very true. I go to Turing point, and our school is just as said. The cell was so-pose to be a mouth long project but instead it took us kids about a week to get it completely finished. We took the cell and the organelles to logan avenue, Timberman, and LNIS.
April 23, 2008 at 8:43 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )