The page that connects Physics and Astronomy with Elementary School Teachers.
The authors of this page are:
Dr. Art
Art Huffman teaches physics and astronomy at UCLA and has been in charge of the lecture demonstration facility for decades. His active involvement in school out-reach programs gives him a special understanding of the problems related to bringing physics and astronomy to everyone.
Mr. Bill
Bill Layton has taught physics in high school for many years and is working at UCLA in preparing future teachers. It has always been his challenge to make the seemingly complex concepts of physics as clearly understandable as they can possibly be.
Our goal is to help Elementary School Teachers bring Physics and Astronomy to their classroom.
This page has been created for the truly dedicated and over-worked elementary school teacher. Its purpose is to give these teachers ideas, activities, instruction and moral support in helping them to include basic physics and astronomy in their lesson plans. Kids and everyone else are welcome but our intended audience is K-6 Teachers.
If you are a parent and would like to help, check out our suggestions for parent involvement
If you are a student, this page really isn't for you but you might like to check out some web pages that are intended for young people.
If you are still with us, we are going to assume that you are a teacher of young people and would like some assistance with your teaching of physics and astronomy. We hope we don't bore you but you will find that we won't zap you with spectacular graphics and we will assume that you can (and will) read. We will have to use graphics to illustrate much of what we present but we hope that by keeping them to simple black and white line drawings, they will load faster and also will be appropriate for you to download and copy for use with your classes. Our general format will be first, to include background information in basic physics and astronomy which we hope will bring teachers to a better understanding of the material. Then, as much as possible, we plan to follow this background information with suggested activities that we hope you will be able to use with your classes. We have tried to keep the expense of all materials required for these student activities to a minimum and we hope you can purchase them almost anywhere (and not just in a scientific supply house.) Enough talk, why don't you take a look at what we have:
It is our intent to have this page change and improve as we start getting feedback from you teachers out there. For that reason we have prepared an evaluation form so experienced K-6 teachers can let us know how we are doing. Art and Bill are far too ignorant of the real problems grade school teachers face daily to be qualified to author this page but, we are willing to learn. Hopefully, as the year goes by, with your helpful suggestions, we will get better. (Should you encounter difficulty in making the evaluation form work or if you would rather use e-mail, Bill will be happy to accept your comments at: layton@physics.ucla.edu )