Saugus High School juniors head to Museum of Science in Boston

SAUGUS – Saugus High School juniors got a rare treat last week as part of their science curriculum: a field trip to the Museum of Science in Boston.”I was in class and a lot of the students were telling me they hadn’t been to the Museum of Science since they were little,” said first-year science teacher Marlene King. “So I planned a trip.”Junior David Picariello is in King’s physics class and said it was good to get out of school for the day, noting it’s been a long time since his last field trip.”It was the first field trip I went on since like seventh grade,” said Picariello. “The science museum is awesome. There is so much stuff to do there. You’re going to learn, but you learn in a better way than sitting there and watching things. It’s hands-on. You get to touch things and do things.”Picariello said the light and electricity exhibits were by far his favorite, especially the one where your shadow is frozen onto a wall.”Two people can stand on the platform and someone else hits a button and there’s a countdown from five,” said Picariello. “You can jump up and do any random pose, and when the flash goes off you’re blinded, but behind you there’s the shadow that you created. We did it like five times.”But while Picariello liked the electricity exhibit, he said the birth exhibit was by far the most memorable part of the trip.”That was gross,” said Picariello. “Our entire junior class was brought in and we just sat in that little room for like 20 minutes and watched the birth video. All the boys like ran out and the girls were just disgusted.”King said the field trip last week coincided perfectly with some of the recent lessons that she’s taught.”We studied in class how you can mix different lights to get different colors and pigments,” said King. “We had also played with shadows in the classroom with different colored lights. It gives them a chance to do things that we can’t do in the class. Some things they experience at the museum we talk about or we can do a limited experiment with because we only have a certain amount of supplies here.”King said her class had just finished a unit on light and lenses, which was still fresh in her students’ minds last week.”There were so many times on the trip where students said, ‘Oh, this is just like what we were doing in class,’ or ‘This is what you were talking about,'” said King. “There was a huge mirror there and they were playing with it and seeing how the images inverted as you moved further away. I don’t have a giant mirror so they can play with things we don’t have here.”King said her students will be starting a unit on electricity when they get back from vacation and had finished a lesson on astronomy several weeks ago, all topics they got to learn about first hand at the museum.”They got to hear a little bit about how planets are discovered and it was a good experience for them to see that,” said King. “Plus, it doesn’t hurt to get a little bit of interest in astronomy as well. Some of the kids said they didn’t have any interest until they saw the movie.”That includes Junior Allie Serino, who said she really liked the planetarium section, including the video about the sun and planets.”I thought that was cool,” said Serino. “I wasn’t really into space until I saw that. It’s weird to think that outside our universe there’s so much more, like exoplanets. I love the dinosaurs too. I think they’re so cool.”Matt Tempesta can be reached at [email protected].