Programs · Science
Science, with actual dirt in it.
Two wet labs, a creek, a microscope bench, and a standing rule that a hypothesis you cannot test is just a mood.
- Ages
- 9–14
- Meets
- Mon & Wed
- Capacity
- 14 per block
- Lab
- Hawthorne & Cully
Science at STENCH is not a demonstration. Nobody stands at the front and makes a volcano while kids watch. Kids have their own bench, their own notebook, and their own jar of creek water, and they are responsible for writing down what happened even when what happened was nothing.
A term, roughly
Fall term is water: we sample Johnson Creek and a storm drain, test pH and turbidity, look at what lives in a drop, and try to explain why two sites a mile apart read differently. Winter is chemistry you can do in a kitchen — acids, bases, indicators, emulsions, and one memorable afternoon making soap that smelled like a mistake. Spring is the Science Fair, which is less a competition than a public accounting of eleven weeks of work.
Every kid keeps a field notebook. Not a worksheet — a real composition book with dates, sketches, and wrong guesses left in. We do not erase wrong guesses. They are the most useful pages.
What kids make
- A water-quality map of their own neighborhood, sampled at four points they chose.
- A working microscope slide library, labeled by the kid who made it.
- An eleven-week notebook, which goes home with them at the end of term.
- A Science Fair project with a question, a method, data, and a poster they can defend out loud.
A typical Wednesday
| Time | What happens |
|---|---|
| 3:15 | Snack and notebook check-in. One sentence: what did you notice since last week? |
| 3:45 | Skill block — pipetting, filtering, measuring, or microscope technique. |
| 4:30 | Open investigation. Kids run their own question with staff at the bench. |
| 5:30 | Notebook out. Write what happened, including what failed. |
| 5:50 | Cleanup. All glassware, all benches, all goggles. |
The hardest thing to teach is not the method. It is the part where you write down the result you did not want. We practice that every single week.
Pick two. Stay eleven weeks. Show somebody.
Every program runs one afternoon a week for a full term. Kids choose two, and we do not shuffle them around like a tasting menu.