Hands on Science with LabRatz

In the summer of 2008 the Homeless Children's Education Fund offered to the Allegheny County shelters it serves an opportunity for a "hands-on" science camp experience for their resident children. Sisters Place welcomed the LabRatz Science Club for a week-long adventure during which the children and youths created chemical reactions, got acquainted with a turtle named Maxwell, used a microscope to see all sorts of tiny things too small to see with just our eyes, found fossils in rocks, examined deer bones and pieced together skeletal remains, learned how potential energy becomes kinetic energy.

Mr. LabRatz says: "Science is all around you. Science is fun!" For example:

Is there something about each of these objects that links it to all the others? Ask a Sisters Place kid who held, examined, and talked with Mr. LabRatz about each of them.

Some things you need to get acquainted with before any serious hands-on. Turtles, for example, especially if you've never seen one this big. Beware of sharp toenails! Mr. LabRatz says turtles are reptiles. Some of the more adventuresome may have wished for a different species of reptile: a snake perhaps, even a BABY alligator. Others are happy it's just a turtle.

Go to

What else we did this summer: Went to the zoo

or Back to Focus on Children