Forum Flashbacks: April 27-May 3
FORUM FILE PHOTO
15 YEARS AGO: The building blocks of life —Two Nodaway County schools will be represented at the “ibuild” Challenge, competing against more than 900 middle school pupils, in Kansas City Tuesday. Armed with paper and glue, toothpicks and clay, parley and kitty litter, Nodaway-Holt and Jefferson C-123 middle school pupils took on the task of designing and building a park and community center that would fit in the top of an 11×16 inch paper box — and they could only spend $5. Nodaway-Holt students involved in the “ibuild” Challenge are, left to right, Darcie Gallagher, Megan Rosenbohm, Zach Callow and Nick Patterson. Others involved in the project are Darcy Brown, Zach Lemar, Devin Luke, Duston Wetzel and senior facilitator Alex Callow.
5 years ago
Horace Mann Laboratory School is putting an emphasis on combining nature and learning with its Outdoor Classroom.
Principal Sandy Seipel says she believes giving kids an outdoor area is important in their learning experience.
“It is so important for kids to get outside; research tells us that it is important to get outside, not just to be around nature but to be able to go out and just taking the learning outside,” Seipel said. “Our kids today don’t get out enough; we’re cooped up inside for so long that it’s nice to get outside.”
The Outdoor Classroom, scheduled to be completed in May, is being built in front of the elementary school to replace a playground that was lost when Northwest Missouri State University extended its tennis courts.
The new area is being modeled in part after the Early Childhood Center’s outdoor play area while adding a learning component, said Seipel. The school commissioned Nature Explorer, a company that applies research to create outdoor learning areas across the country, to design its Outdoor Classroom.
15 years ago
Do plant seeds that have been grown in space differ from those grown on Earth?
NASA astronauts aren’t sure, but that’s what Northeast Nodaway Elementary School pupils hope to discover.
The fourth and fifth graders spent Thursday at noon planting seeds for the Plant Growth Symposium project — a project that would not be possible without the grant they received from NASA last year.
Seeds that astronauts had while in the International Space Station were given to NEN students to plant and compare to seeds here on Earth.
Students planted their seeds in salad bowls donated from Maryville’s McDonald’s and ice cream cups from Sonic, and now have their plants sitting in their classrooms.
Working within that growth chamber, the children will be taking into account how they are going to water them and what, if any, difference there will be between the types of seeds.
Denise Henggeler, a fourth grade teacher at NEN Elementary School, said the children are more curious about learning now.
“It’s amazing — their opinions and attitudes toward science, their excitement,” Henggeler said. “They have started questioning their own experiments, saying, ‘I wonder — what if we do this?’ Now science is more than a subject to them. It’s every day life.”
As a NASA Explorer School, the Northeast Nodaway School district has been able to gain and capture the attention of students genuinely interested in learning about science. …
Via a television, students have been able to communicate with astronauts and other NASA Explorer Schools, to bring a different kind of learning experience to the classroom.
While NASA focuses on the fourth through eighth grade classes for their explorer schools, the entire district participates in the program somehow, Henggeler said. …
Henggeler added that NASA focuses on that age group because that’s the time students will either become really interested in science or not.
“The light in their eyes, the excitement in their faces when something happens,” she said. “It’s unexpected. It all related to what they do in the world. I see them paying more attention to things going on in the world around them and in school.”
100 years ago
K. K. K. Meeting to Be in Maitland Tonight
A Ku Klux Klan meeting and lecture will be held tonight at the fair grounds at Maitland. Posters and hand bills to this effect have been circulated over that part of the country and quite a crowd is expected to attend. The leading part of the program will be an address which will be given at 7:30 o’clock by the Rev. U. S. Lacey, pastor at one of the Presbyterian churches in Des Moines. Mr. Lacy will talk on the K. K. K.
The meeting will be open to men, women, and children and is free. A number of handbills of the affair have been circulated in Maryville and other towns in the county and, from all indications, the meeting will be one of the largest demonstrations of the Klan in this part of the state.
Mr. Lacey is a Chautauqua lecturer as well as a minister and his talk will doubtless draw a large crowd. A number of persons from Maryville are planning to attend.
It is not known whether a public demonstration of the Klan, outside of the lecture, will be made. Neither is it known if members will appear in K. K. K. regalia.
The 100-year flashback is courtesy of the Missouri Digital Newspaper Project from the State Historical Society of Missouri, viewable at shsmo.newspapers.com. The original article ran in the May 2, 1923, edition of The Maryville Daily Democrat-Forum, which later would become the The Maryville Forum.
