Citizen Schools Teaching Apprenticeship

Citizen Schools is an after school program that puts citizen teachers, such as professionals and academics, into New York city middle-schools to teach classes based on their fields of expertise. The goal is to help students make clear connections between their schoolwork and future careers.

A group of graduate students and I developed a semester long curriculum on natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes and snow storms at the Harlem Renaissance Leadership Academy. Our weekly class typically involved teaching some basic ideas about a natural disaster followed by a hands on activity that showcased the ideas. Activities included: triangulating an earthquake in the playground, measuring impact craters using foil meteors falling into trays of flour and a building water filtration system.

Each week the class would work towards a final project which was a collaborative effort amongst the students to research, write and publish an article in a news paper for kids written by kids called "Indy Kids". The article is titled "Stronger storms in a warming world".

Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Open House

Every two years Lamont Doherty earth Observatory opens its campus to the public for a day of presentations, interactive science demonstrations and laboratory tours to engage the public in earth science. Open house attracts thousands of visitors engaging both children and adults.

As a member of the ocean-climate-physics division, I performed weather in a tank demonstrations to showcase the physics of everyday weather. We demonstrated the importance of earth's rotation, using a rotating tank of water, and the earth's north-south temperature gradient, using ice, in producing key components of the large-scale climatological circulation. The demonstrations included producing a Hadley cell and subtropical jet stream, mid-latitude storms and Taylor columns.

American Museum of Natural History Sun-Earth day

Sun earth day is a day long event for children of all ages geared toward exploring the relationship between the sun and the earth which allows all life to exist on earth.

My fellow graduate student Catherine Pomposi and I introduced the earth's water cycle using a dice game where children would learn about the trajectory of a given water droplet as it travelled through different water cycle reservoirs such as the ocean, clouds, rivers and glaciers.

Each child is given a pipe cleaner to form a bracelet where each bead represents their trajectory as a water droplet moving through different reservoirs. The children roll weighted die, representative of the likely path of a water droplet, to move from one reservoir to the next.