SANTA PAULA : Science Fair Starts With a Big Bang

Clad in caveman motif, Ivoree Venegas, 11, smashed her toy club on Adolfo Sanchez’s head as the 12-year-old dressed in a loincloth giggled with glee.

If the two fifth-graders were going to spend their day dressed as a live exhibit at the Santa Paula Elementary School District’s annual Science Fair, they were going to have a good time.

“I don’t know why it’s fun,” Adolfo said with a laugh as Ivoree walloped him again with the squeaky, plastic weapon. “Tomorrow, I’m going to wake up with a lot of bumps.”

Held at Barbara Webster School, the district’s science magnet, the fair consisted of a building full of individual and class projects, many of which were weeks in the making. It included a mix of displays, video presentations and live exhibits.

On Wednesday, students from kindergarten to fifth grade toured the fair.

The fair featured a time warp hallway, which began at one end with flashing lights that symbolize the Big Bang and ended with the appearance of humans, as portrayed by the two battling fifth-graders.

Each room in the maze that was the Science Fair was crowded with projects, such as “How Do Seeds Grow?” by first-grade students at Thelma Bedell School.

A poster propped up behind clusters of leaf-sprouting, dirt-filled plastic cups explained the experiment’s process of hypothesis and conclusion.

* “Guess: The seeds will make roots. Then the roots will grow and then the leaves.

* “Test: We planted our seeds in the dirt. We put water on them.

* “Tell: Our seeds grew. The roots grew first. Then the stem grew. Our seeds did not all grow at the same time.”

Linda Bean’s chattering second-grade students from Glen City School took about an hour to wind their way through the fair.

Mark Compton, 7, a student in Bean’s class, said one of his favorite parts of the fair was the video explaining the Big Bang.

“Oh, that was bad !” he said, grinning his approval. “That was cool! It tells you all about the universe. It was like being in school, because you are learning lots of stuff.”