Josh Sandlian likes to think of science as a football game.
“During the week, you are practicing concepts like throwing, catching and tackling,” Sandlian said. Those football skills are similar to math and language arts.
For Sandlian, science is the opportunity for students to apply their math and language arts skills to real situations.
“Friday night is the game,” he said. “Science is that football game. It lets kids show what they know.”
As the first science facilitator in Carbon County School District No. 2, Sandlian is trying to make science a focus for students throughout the district.
Superintendent Bob Gates asked Sandlian to become the science facilitator during the 2012-2013 school year, Sandlian said. Since then, Sandlian and other district officials have worked on designing a K-6 science curriculum, and revamping other programs.
This year, Sandlian is working on redesigning the Summer Science Program.
For the past several years, CCSD 2 has used Teton Science Schools, a program that has been involved in education since 1967, to run its Summer Science Program. Sandlian wants CCSD 2 teachers to take over all instruction of the summer camp.
“If we want to have ownership in it, we need to start doing this with our own teachers running the show,” he said.
Teton Science Schools uses a method of teaching called place-based education. The method is designed to teach students science by using local resources, like the North Platte River or the fish hatchery.
“We are trying to encourage our new staff to be trained in place-based education so that they feel comfortable using the resources in our valley to assist them in delivering knowledge to students,” Sandlian said.
Sandlian’s goal is to train enough teachers to completely take over the Summer Science Program within the next two years.
Sandlian wants to continue using Teton Science Schools and sending students to Teton Science Camp after the district takes over the summer program.
The program has had some impact on students in the past.
Saratoga Elementary School fourth-grader Heather Wallace got involved in the Teton Science School program last year when they took students to the Indian Bathtubs, a rock formation near Encampment.
“It was really neat because we got to study the animals that were there and why they were called the Indian bathtubs,” Wallace said.
Wallace also learned about decomposition and the process plants go through to create oxygen, she said.
All of Wallace’s exposure to science has had an impact on her, she said.
“It’s probably my favorite subject,” she said. “It is just fun and you get to learn how things live in the world like how trees breathe, how they can help us and how they can provide animals with shade and food.”
Grabbing the interest of students was one of Sandlian’s goals when he developed the K-6 science curriculum, he said.
“The K-6 levels is what we really focused on to develop this capacity of learning for those levels,” Sandlain said.
Sadlian, along with teachers and district officials, developed the curriculum last school year and put it into place for the 2013-2014 school year.
The new curriculum also utilizes place-based education, and is designed to get kids interested in education at a young age.
“They want to learn, and those students will pick this up,” Sandlian said. “If we can challenge them at a younger age and get them interested in science, they will continue to have that need and want to learn at the secondary level.”
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