Themes and Activities

After School and Summer Enrichment Themes

Themes and activities are designed to capture your child’s interest. They are available either as after school or summer programs or may be incorporated into the school day as a class activity. All are inquiry based and require active student participation. Following is a short description of some popular themes.

• Forensics: Does crime scene investigation sound like fun? In this course you will learn to use real crime scene investigation techniques to solve forensic mysteries. Fingerprinting, blood typing, examining blood spatter, chromatography, chemical analysis, and examining trace evidence under a microscope are all techniques used in this workshop.
• How Does That Work?:  Have you ever wondered how everyday things work?  In this workshop some of the things we will do is make a thermometer, investigate light and optics, dissect a heart  and a camara.
• Exploring Ponds and Ditches: From the nature of water and its’ physical properties, to microscopic life, to crayfish to birds, you will learn about farm pond uses and ecology and will investigate the remarkable fresh water life found ditches and puddles surrounding Darwin’s Workshop.
• Light and Shadow: When we look at the stars, examine the lens of a cow’s eye, watch the colors change on bubbles or cook a meal using the sun, light shows us our world. We will use activities and experiments drawn from chemistry, biology and physics to investigate the properties and behavior of light, colors and shadow.
• Come to Your Senses: How Your Body Discovers the World: Count your taste buds, make a devastating perfume, track a prize by smell, use a coat hanger to create a gong and measure the distance between your touch receptors. You will explore the anatomy and physiology of our senses; touch, sight, hearing, taste, and smell through a series of experiments and projects.
• Everyday Chemistry: Watch things bubble and fizz, change colors and temperature as you study physical and chemical properties of matter. We will answer such questions as: Why does aspirin upset our stomachs? and which type of antacid works the best? We will make our own pH indicator and test it on various substances and we will construct molecular models from chemical formulas to predict how molecules and atoms will interact.

Tutoring

Tutoring is available for students from kindergarten thru adult.