What I'm Reading

Yesterday, my public school fourth grade class, along with my neighbor-teacher's class, presented the Scientist of the Week to the whole school. It's a big school. A thousand students. And our students did a good job. We were assigned Blaise Pascal, and I love the stories about Pascal in the AIMS Historical Connections in Mathematics book, love Pascal's Triangle, love coloring Pascal's Triangle fractals, love. But. But we hadn't had a female scientist, and so, for the fifth Scientist of the Week, I asked if we could please present Marie Curie.

We had four days to prepare our presentation, so I spent a lot of last week reading about Curie. Two quotes jumped out at me. The first is...

“You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end, each of us must work for our own improvement and, at the same time, share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think can be most useful.” 

Here are 3 of the 17 posters our students made to illustrate Curie's biography.

And here's the second...

"A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales."

(Interesting fact one of my students shared today from her library book: The Curie's "lab" was a shed with a dirt floor!)