Institute brings science to the great outdoors
Program uses grants and scholarships to provide low-income students with hands-on, nature-based lessons through free field trips and summer camps
Simulating the forces behind earthquakes, 21 fourthgraders flattened balls of clay onto cardboard, then simultaneously gripped the clay and yanked apart the boards, representing the Earth’s diverging tectonic plates.
It was a challenging manipulation for small hands, with predictable results.
“Oh no, Iceland fell into the water,” exclaimed August Gordon Hart, 9.
The exercise was part of a recent morning of hands-on lessons at the Youth Science Institute at Alum Rock Park. Teacher Donna Hamane’s students from Alviso’s George Mayne Elementary also created a S’mores-like representation of the Earth’s core and mantle, involving candy, marshmallow, chocolate and graham cracker crumbs. They hiked past the park’s sulfurous hot springs and were thrilled by a cameo appearance of a nonchalant family of deer.
It’s the kind of experiences that transfixes students, inspires teachers and feeds everyone’s cu-
“I’ve never seen a deer before. Looking at plants and animals was really cool.” — Jeffrey Lee, 9, who loved being outdoors
riosity.
“We got to actually see the stuff in real life and not just in pictures,” said Kaya Whitesell, 9, about her class’s trip.
“I’ve never seen a deer before,” said classmate Jeffrey Lee, 9, who loved being outdoors. “Looking at plants and animals was really cool.”
Heading into its 65th year, Youth Science Institute hosts field trips and summer camps for kids from pre-kindergarten through sixth grade and runs nature centers at Alum Rock and Vasona parks. The institute also takes its menagerie of reptiles, insects and mammals to visit schools.
“We found through studies within Santa Clara County that teachers don’t spend a lot of time with science in classroom,” said YSI Executive Director Erika
Buck. The institute has 30 full- and part-time staffers, and over a year’s time about 200 youth and adult volunteers.
YSI provides a limited number of its field trips for free, to schools like George Mayne with high numbers of children from poor families — roughly one-third of the public schools in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties.
At Ben Painter Elementary in San Jose, fifth-grade
teacher Cynthia Mykkanen makes sure to apply early for the YSI field trip grants. Painter, where 89 percent of children live in poverty, has no PTA.
“We don’t have the funds, and definitely our students’ families don’t have funds to go on field trips,” Mykkanen said. Her students attended a YSI program on Ohlone living. Kids made tule ropes, ground acorns, washed their hands with
soaproot and sampled Ohlone cuisine.
“It really brings home our social studies content, how geography and environment shaped Native American lives,” Mykkanen said.
Beyond the science projects, excursions broaden kids’ world. For most of Mykkanen’s students, the YSI field trip is their first visit to Alum Rock Park, just four miles from their school in the Alum Rock Union School District.
With steep, sedimentary canyon walls and soaring 2,000-foot peaks, the park introduces children to a world of abundant squirrel burrows, historic hot springs and winding Penitencia Creek nestled between the Alum Rock and Berryessa neighborhoods.
In another YSI program, teacher Lisa Dries’s kindergartners tasted sarsaparilla, smelled bay leaf, touched redwood bark, listened to birds call and smelled the sulfur springs.
It’s the ideal trip for her class. “Kindergartners are really tactile,” she said.
YSI’s 10 school programs cover topics such as the physics of sound and motion, pond life and insects, spiders and arthropods. The programs at three parks range in cost from $200 to $550.
The institute’s nature centers at Alum Rock and Vasona are open most days, allowing the public to cuddle chinchillas Simon and Theo — ultra-plush, reallife versions of Pikachu — and Ike and Mike, gopher snake and mountain kingsnake buddies.
The Alum Rock Nature Center also features mounted animals, including a golden eagle and mountain lion, and scores of specimens in its centuryold Holmes Bird Collection.
“Animals are people magnets,” said Dorothy “DJ” Johnson, the longtime YSI Alum Rock curator who often fields critter questions. “They want to know what’s in their area and what goes bump in the night.”
As Hamane’s class hiked toward Alum Rock springs pouring from 100-yearold stone grottoes, YSI instructor Sarah Lofgren cautioned, “Look, listen, smell and touch — but do not taste.” And, she said, stay away from the beautiful orange and gold poison oak.
“It was fun being outside,” said Jessica Guerrero, 9, who concedes that she normally doesn’t like hiking. “I like sitting on my couch reading,” she said. But “I think the field trip was actually fun.”