Hermosa Beach teachers absorb lessons of spring shutdown as they ready for first day of school
Lia Navas, a second grade teacher at Hermosa View, readies her classroom for the first day of school next week. Photo by JP Cordero It’s tough to conceive of a class that is simultaneously less suited to social distancing and harder to replicate over the internet than the Sparks Lab at Hermosa View School. The class, funded primarily through philanthropy, teaches STEM principles to first, second and third graders through what educators call “project-based learning.” In practice, that means gathering in an indoor lab, with students from multiple classes, for sessions heavy on up-close collaboration and sharing materials, set to a soundtrack of open-mouthed oohs-and-ahhs. In the pre-pandemic era, students in the Sparks Lab have created short-films using stop-motion animation, and assembled balloon floats like smaller versions of those seen in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. This spring, with campuses in the Hermosa Beach City School District shuttered, Sparks lab teacher Malinda Gill began asking herself what sorts of experiments her students might be able to cobble together at home. It did not take her long to hit on an answer: packaging, of the kind that Amazon and other…
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