Caroline Singler (TAS 2010) received a local Massachusetts Foundation for Educators at Lincoln Sudbury (FELS) grant to travel with a colleague to Hawaii for two weeks this summer in order to study geological features of the Big Island. Caroline teaches science at Lincoln Sudbury Regional High School in Leominster, MA. You can read her FELS blog at her experience in Hawaii here.

Caroline had the following to share:

   What did you hope to achieve in HI?

I have had a strong interest in volcanoes since I first became a geology student in college. It’s a topic that always captures the attention of high school students and one for which I already have a lot of enthusiasm, and I felt that a trip to see the active volcanoes on the Big Island would give me some fun first-hand experiences to share with my students.

   Your focus was geology/earth science. How did you use your experience in the classroom and community when you returned?

Because I made the trip with a fellow Earth Science teacher, we had several goals in mind with respect to ways in which we could share the experience with our students and the community. Our blog was a way to share the trip as it happened with family and friends, and current and future students can read about it as well. We took hundreds of photos, so when I teach about volcanoes, I can use my own images instead of downloaded photos, and we hope to use some of them to create a virtual field trip for our students. We had fun coming up with and performing simple experiments to demonstrate the change in air pressure with altitude as we drove to the top of Mauna Kea. This is a concept that can be difficult for students to understand. Now we have photos of balloons that expanded as we ascended, soda bottles that compressed on descent, and we even recorded the change in tire pressure. We visited several different types of beaches to do a comparison of sand compositions around the island. We also made weather observations throughout the trip and photographed the different climate zones we encountered as we made our way across the island. There really wasn’t a day when we didn’t do something with our Earth Science classes in mind. Later this year, we will give a talk for the general public at the local library.

The FELS grant was started in 2000 with parents of present and past Lincoln-Sudbury High School students who were deeply grateful to the professional staff for their unflagging dedication, tireless effort and genuine care that they routinely offer their students. FELS is a non-profit organization composed of committed faculty whose goal is to show appreciation of the Lincoln-Sudbury High School staff by awarding enrichment grants that enable teachers to develop their personal and professional interests.

Caroline teaches science at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in Leominster, MA and was aboard USCGC Healy while scientists conducted an Arctic Continental Shelf Survey. You can read Caroline’s TAS blogs here.