Fourth grade science teachers, Laura Cook, Jill Jones, Dana Judson, and Cheryl Zenko, along with Kensington science coordinator, Linda Bracken, were awarded a grant entitled Valley Trip Connect.

All fourth grade classes travel to the Rocky River Nature Center and the Rocky River Valley every spring for an outdoor field study. This grant enabled teachers to enhance the instruction by connecting the site experience with follow-up classroom activities.  Students used landform demonstration kits to recognize and identify common landforms of our area.  They also experimented with interactive stream tables to compare and contrast the processes that shape and reshape the Earth’s surface.  Fossil collections and molds allowed students to serve as junior paleontologists for the day. 

Valley Trip Connect successfully bridged classroom instruction to the Rocky River Valley Trip.  Students were able to gain a greater depth of understanding through the use of hands-on materials and simulations.  The most intriguing, innovative part of the program was seeing processes that take hundreds to millions of years to occur happen within minutes.  The fourth grade looks forward to continuing this project as part of the Valley Trip for many years to come.