Students’ Interest in Science, Math Bubbles Over at Festival

In Conejo Valley Elementary School’s open classrooms, scented with the perfume of Blue Dawn dish soap, bubbles were everywhere--floating through the air, piled in giant gobs on tables and stuck to students’ hands.

Friday morning’s bubble activities were more than just good clean fun for students in the school’s four open classrooms, which range from kindergarten through sixth grade.

Teachers at the school say experimenting with bubbles gives students the chance to exercise their minds by figuring out why things--such as a film of soap and water a thousandth of an inch thick--behave the way they do.

“It’s hands-on learning,” said kindergarten teacher Colleen Briner-Schmidt, who organized the school’s bubble festival. “It’s another way of getting kids excited about math and science. They’re discovering things I wouldn’t have expected them to discover, and that’s true scientific experimentation.”

Based on classroom activities developed at the University of California at Berkeley’s Lawerence Hall of Science, the bubble experiments use inexpensive and easily obtainable materials that fit into today’s tight school budgets.

In the corner of one classroom, students stepped onto a stool in the middle of a blue plastic wading pool. Once safely on the stool, someone--such as one of the many parents who helped out at the bubble festival--pulled a Hula Hoop out of the water, and along with it a huge bubble over the students’ heads.

“It was kind of weird,” said 8-year-old Renee Gutierrez, a third-grader. “It felt like I’m getting wet but I’m not.”

Elsewhere, children experimented with all sorts of bubbles. Not your common, garden variety round kind, but flat ones, colored ones and “skeletons”--bubbles that look like they have been turned inside out. In one classroom students even froze bubbles in an aquarium full of dry ice.

“When the bubbles hit the dry ice, the gas from it keeps them up and they keep getting bigger,” said 10-year-old Keith Hendrix, a fifth-grader known by his classmates as “The Bubble Master.”

Keith, who wants to be an inventor, said he has come up with all kinds of ways to make almost any kind of bubble he wants, including a device attached to a hat that can make bubbles while a person runs. Friday’s activities have brought him a lot closer to filing his first patent, he said. “You get to use a whole bunch of tools to make bubbles, and it’s fun,” he said. “There’s more than one way to make a bubble--there’s always more than one way.”