Girls are proud to be GEMS,
worms and all!
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On Wednesday afternoons, girls at Operation Breakthrough examine bacteria and rummage through pans of earthworms. After a long day at school, they’re eager to grab their clipboards and make notes about rotting garbage. Their hands fly into the air when volunteers are needed to calculate which weighs more – a baby elephant or the amount of trash a person generates in a year.
Clearly, these girls are GEMS – “Girls Excelling at Math and Science.” Their club formed last fall when volunteer Julie Carmichael offered to bring to the Center some hands-on math and science activities for the girls in 5th through 7th grade. The girls embraced her, along the worms, germs and brainteasers she brings with her.
Ask 12-year-old Wykisa Williams what she likes about GEMS and she says: ``Everything!”
Every GEMS meeting is action-packed with multiple activities based around a theme. The girls made recycled paper the same day they studied the effect of letting earthworms munch for a month on a mixture of various kinds of trash. That day they also played a game designed to heighten their powers of scientific observation and calculated that the GEMS together generate trash weighing as much as three baby elephants in one year.
At every meeting Julie also highlights several real women with careers in math and science – a marine biologist, an architect, a NASA scientist, a meteorologist. Julie, herself, seems like Bill Nye, the Science Guy, Ms. Frizzle of “Magic School Bus” fame and a junior high science teacher all rolled into one.
“No,” says Julie, “I am just a mother whose daughter came home from school one day and said, ‘I hate science. I hate math.’”
Alarmed, Julie created GEMS for her daughter, Hannah, and her classmates about three years ago. Ten of those girls, now 8th graders at Holy Trinity School in Lenexa, help out at the Center’s GEMS meetings.
“Attitude makes a big difference,” Julie says. “Research shows that by age 12, children have formed hard and fast beliefs about the subjects at which they excel and those in which they fail.”
In our technology-driven world, students who are not interested in math and science will be left behind, Julie says. “Girls everywhere, but especially at Operation Breakthrough, need to know that math and science can be fun.”
At a recent meeting, she asked the girls to raise their hands if they had not wanted to join GEMS in the beginning.
“Every hand went up,” Julie says. “Then I asked them how many now like the club, and, again, every hand went up.
“…Our sessions are loud, messy and chaotic,” Julie says, “but somewhere in all the chaos, each girl is writing conclusions, calculating averages, drawing graphs and hopefully making an important statement about herself: ‘I choose to spend time on math and science. I am good at math and science. I could one day be a scientist.’” |
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