On Thursday, 10-year-old Baile Kalaukoa loved her science class.
Most days, as she explains it, learning at her school – Orchard Knob Elementary – is focused on books. Other kids will talk or laugh and struggle to pay attention. Even Kalaukoa has lost interest at time, she admits.
But not Thursday.
“We got to experiment with how oil and water separate,” she said. “We used food color and made a lava lamp. When we regularly do science we do it out of a book and we read it and they [the other students] joke around, but today we could actually see what happened.”
To celebrate National Chemistry Week, employees with BASF, a German chemical manufacturing company with a facility in Chattanooga, came to the school to offer a hands-on lab for more than 100 fifth-graders and help expose the children to a career in the chemical manufacturing industry.