Quincy Students Have the Power

Fourth graders at Quincy Elementary have spent the last three weeks on a project dealing with electricity. They’ve been learning about the path electricity takes to get to their homes by looking at circuits, conductors and insulators, and by exploring switches, playing with magnets and building electromagnets. They visited Jeffrey Energy Center last week, hosted Westar Engineer Ron Gwaltney yesterday, and today they toured the Education Station at the Kanza Science Park.

During Gwaltney’s visit to the school yesterday, the students learned about safety and the protective equipment linemen wear. They had the opportunity to try on some of the safety gear to see how it protects the head, eyes, ears and hands.

At today’s visit to the Education Station, the students learned about transmission lines (the lines that feed electricity into the station) and about distribution lines (the lines that carry the electricity out and into the community). They also visited the wind turbine.

Gina Scali, the district’s 6th-12th grade consulting science teacher, helped plan the project and was pleased with the results. “The kids have been so excited about this. They didn’t know much about electricity before and they asked a lot of good questions,” she said.
Gwaltney was impressed, too. “They picked up on it very quickly and, once we began talking about it, they could anticipate what was going to happen next.”

The students will soon be holding a mini science fair to share all the things they have learned throughout the project.