Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, October 10, 1993                   TAG: 9310080194
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-3   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: VICTORIA CARROLL CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: RADFORD                                LENGTH: Medium

TURNED ON, TUNED IN

Then tell them they'll have to write a composition about it.

Hear them fidget. Watch their eyes glaze over.

But this year in Virginia, teachers are setting their fifth-graders loose in school parking lots. There, the students can discover science, ask questions, debate answers and, the teachers hope, get "turned on" to science.

"A large part of science is learning to be an observer and an investigator and a gatherer of knowledge," says fifth-grade teacher Susan Frye.

On a sunny Wednesday afternoon, Frye walks her 31 students out of the classroom and onto the blacktop parking lot at Bethel Elementary School where they discover grasshoppers, crab grass, spiders, pebbles and bits of tar. They feel the heat of the asphalt parking lot and compare it to the cool concrete sidewalk.

Each new discovery leads to lively discussion for the students, now excited about science and eager to speak up. Frye encourages students' ideas, prompts them with follow-up questions and helps them express their scientific discoveries.

"Be more specific about that," she urges dozens of times during the hour.

"It's the most important part about this, getting kids turned on to science," said Frye. "I think all of it, inquiring and questioning and observing - those are the science skills we're missing in school today."

Frye's guide for the parking-lot outing is a page from a teachers' field guide compiled by Frank Taylor, winner of a 1991 Presidential Award for Science and Mathematics Teaching and a research associate at the Virginia Museum of Natural History at Virginia Tech.

A $175,000 grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute took Taylor last year from his 10th-grade biology classroom at Radford High School to the museum post.

His on-going mission: To develop "An Inquiry Field Guide to the Natural History of Southwestern Virginia school yards," a collection of natural and environmental science lessons that encourages students to observe, think, investigate and draw conclusions.

"My job is to empower teachers with this content, knowledge and science process skills so that they can take their classes out and engage students in hands-on, discovery-oriented activities," Taylor said.

About 80 teachers from six Southwest Virginia school systems have gone through Taylor's two-day workshop and are using the field guide in their classrooms, or rather their school yards.

The guide divides the school yards into five "habitats" - parking lot, lawn, walls and eaves of the school building fence row and planted/mulched beds. Each habitat, Taylor assures, offers distinct plants, animals, life history and opportunities for scientific discovery.

"When I first talked to some people about doing this, some biologists, they just kind of shook their heads and said, `Boy, what a big school yard, what a uni-dimensional habitat,' " Taylor said. "Well, we've identified over 180 common plants and animals that you're going to find in a school yard."

Taylor can point to discoveries that would take a fifth-grader an entire school year to explore; yet most people walk past them in a parking lot without noticing. Spend an afternoon with him and you'll never look at a dandelion in the same way again.

Over Taylor's desk hangs a copy of an old Chinese proverb, "I hear and forget. I see and remember. I do and I understand."

In the parking lot at Bethel Elementary, Frye's class is "doing" science. Later, they return to the classroom where they quietly write about their discoveries.

"I learned that certain plants can break through asphalt and that spiders can live in a parking lot," writes David Strathy. "It was interesting to brainstorm what could have been in the parking lot 200 years ago."

"The parking lot attracts sunlight," report Tiffany Moran. At the bottom of her page is evidence that this approach to science is working. "I wish I could do this every day," she writes.