Blessed Sacrament School students form Science Club
(SAVANNAH) – Blessed Sacrament School students are staying after school, doing extra work – and having a blast in the process. More than 40 Blessed Sacrament School students attended the school’s first two meetings of the Science Club, which began in March.
The Science Club is designed to provide opportunities for students to explore science beyond the classroom, engaging in experimental, hands-on activities to stimulate their interest in how the world works. Students in 5th through 8th grade meet about once a month to engage in a contest or project related to science.
These science events are designed to challenge the children – it may be to create a device that will accomplish a specific task, or do experiments to measure certain value, investigate how things work or explore other aspects of science. The really good news about the BSS Science Club – no tests and no homework!
One of the activities was a dissection of cows’ eyes, which are essentially identical to the human eye. The dissection allowed the students to look at the muscles and fat associated with eye movement.
“I was very excited about the Science Club the day we dissected a cow's eye,” said BSS student Taylor Schwarz. “It was really fun, but kind of gross at the same time. At first, I thought that my stomach was going to explode, because it did not look anything like I imagined.
“After a while, it started to become less gross and more interesting,” she said. “From this, I learned that sometimes a project is not always as you think it may be, but better! I’m looking forward to seeing what we do at the next Science Club meeting.”
Science is generally done in a group setting, so many of the activities will be done in teams allowing the students to work with other club members. So while the students are learning about science they also get practice working in group settings and developing good communication skills.
“We wantto foster a greater inquisitiveness in our children at BSS about the wonders of the world – this is what science does better than any other discipline,” said Will Lynch, the Blessed Sacrament School Science Club advisor and head of the chemistry department at Armstrong Atlantic State University. “The Club will ask questions and then try to investigate them.”
“We asked each other the question ‘How does the eye work?,’ ” said Lynch. In order to learn more about the eye, they worked with lenses and then pulled out the dissection kit and 12 cow eyes. They removed the fat and muscles using scissors and then located the optic nerve. After came the scalpel and an equatorial incision which exposed the vitreous humor, sclera, cornea, lens and retina.
The students are planning the next several months’ worth of activities, from working with telescopes to chemical reactions (i.e. blowing things up), cryogenics and so on. The club has also had a buoyancy contest called “float your boat.”
Blessed Sacrament School was founded in 1939 with two classrooms and three sisters of Mercy as the first faculty. Today there are two sections of each grade level from Pre-K through 8th grades with a current enrollment of approximately 425 students. The school offers a rigorous, faith-based academic program and maintains small class sizes. Blessed Sacrament is part of the Catholic Diocese of Savannah and has received accreditation by both SACS (Southern Association of Colleges and Schools) and FCC (Florida Catholic Conference).
