- November 27, 2024
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Students in Michelle Coolican’s eighth-grade science class may be volunteering to make butter for family dinner in the near future.
Shaking a mixture of heavy cream and salt to make the bread topper is just one of many food-related mixtures created and studied in Coolican’s kitchen chemistry lab at Buddy Taylor Middle School, funded by a Dell Trayer Teacher Grant.
“Cooking is a love of mine, so I thought, What a wonderful idea,” said Coolican, a first-time grant recipient.
The class also made trail mix, Italian dressing and Kool-Aid and determined if the mixtures were heterogeneous colloids or suspensions, homogeneous solutes or solvents.
Next, the class will take it a step further when they mix red cabbage and egg yoke to make a chemically changed green egg and when they discover the cooking properties of acid when they make ceviche.
The 10-week long program will end with the students creating their own recipes based on a concept learned in class, such as density or boiling point. The class will then compile the recipes into a cookbook to be sold. Proceeds will benefit the Bunnell food bank.
What is a bully?
Another Dell Trayer-funded project is at Rymfire Elementary School. Janene Neal’s special-area health class is using technology to enhance its curriculum.
Currently the fifth- and sixth-grade classes are creating a digital brochure to explain the signs of bullying and ways to stop it. The brochures will address questions such as, What is a bully? Whom do bullies target? and How do you handle bullies?
At the end of the project, the class plans to donate the brochures to the Boys and Girls Club. “We’re trying to get into sharing out,” Neal said.
Although students learned through the project that one in four students will be bullied, Rymfire Principal Paula St. Francis said she doesn’t think they have a bullying problem at their school.
