Spring Hill Science Program

At Spring Hill, we believe that science is a crucial key to success for our students in their education and 21 st century careers. Our vision is to create a student who understands and can think like a "real" scientist. Our full time science resource teacher, Alison Bauer, uses the science lab and outdoor classrooms to provide support to classroom teachers in the development of student scientists. Observation, communication, classification, organization, prediction, inference and application are skills taught in all grades levels, kindergarten through sixth grade.

All students are taught science in their classrooms through hands-on units with the support of trade books provided by Fairfax County Public Schools. Students cycle through the science lab through the use of parallel block scheduling from grades one through five. This strategy allows classroom teachers to keep one half of their students to work in small group settings while sending the other half to the science lab for hands-on instruction. Ms. Campbell receives two groups from two different teachers and instructs a full class. Kindergarten meets every other week and sixth grade uses a team teaching model for chosen units.

The science lab is home to 2,000 plus red wiggler worms dutifully composting cafeteria leftovers, and is the winter home for Squirt, the Nicaraguan river slider. Nature's Hideout, an official National Wildlife Schoolyard Habitat site, is a successful home for toads, turtles, local and migrating birds, butterflies, insects, and several very greedy and fat squirrels! It also contains a vegetable bed and class gardens for growing flowers or curiosities.

Please contact Spring Hill's Science Teacher Alison Bauer for more information.