St. Joseph students show projects

The P.S.E. may be over and the results in…but that doesn’t mean primary school students have stopped learning. Today I stopped by one Belize City school where the June heat did not seem to affect the children’s creativity.

Jacqueline Woods, Reporting

The Science exhibition is nothing new for the students of St. Joseph Primary School. In fact, the activity has become a tradition over the past eight years for the standard six boys and girls.

Anelie May, Science Teacher, St. Joseph Primary School

“Well mostly since the P.S.E. is over, we try to find something in which the kids can interested to keep their motivation going because sometimes they feel like school is all over and they don?t have to do anything else. So we try to encourage them in something educational basically for them to widen their scope of knowledge.”

“They were asked to present a project related to science. Sometimes we do social studies, sometimes we do science. We might alternate. They were told to do a project in science and do research, they were given criteria, the judges have eight different criteria and the judges were informed about it.”

The students spent weeks preparing for their displays and by presentation time, it was clear that the children had done their homework

Jennifer Moguel, Std. 6 Student

“I am doing on the Chalillo hydro-powered dam project. The project is estimated to be somewhat like this. It?s supposed to be forty-nine point five metres high. There are valves that open and when open they reveal passages that go to a power house. In the power house there are turbines. When the water is release the turbines then start to spin. Potential power that the turbines give is used to turn it into electricity for our homes. There are things called irrigation pipes, these take water from the dam to homes all around the country.”

Crystal Allen

“Some examples of what we can recycle is a straw curtain. Here we made a curtain using used straws and some fishing line. What we did was to sew the fishing line into the straw, and to make it colourful we added some beads. Here we have a picture frame. This picture frame was made from a clock. When the clock was spoilt we took out the clock and hands and added in a picture. Over here we have a basket. This basket was made from paletas sticks. What we did was to glue them together to form the basket.”

The displays not only summarised the work the students have accomplished, but as explained by their science teacher Anelie May, the activity is also preparing them for high school.

Anelie May

“As they were preparing I noticed that there were a few who need some skills to go about doing the proper research. The majority needed some coaching, because in primary school we tend to guide them a lot and they need a lot of coaching and guiding. But we remind them that it?s not going to be the same in high school, so we try to tell them that they need to go out there, do your research, find your information, and we try not to baby them or pamper them a lot, they need to learn to do research on their own.”

The exhibitions were judged and the winning students will receive trophies.