Students may now win FREE passes to Tulsa’s all new hand’s-on arts and science children’s museum. Contest is open to all areas schools, public or private, grades K4-5^th grade.  Each classroom teacher will be able to award the top 2 students with a FREE pass to Kaleidoscope.  Once a month, designated school administrator will turn in a complete list of each classrooms’ winners. The students will then be able to receive free admission for the student plus a guest to the museum during regular operating hours.  Teachers will be responsible for making monthly certificates for each student winner which will then be matched to the school  administrator’s monthly list for admission to the museum.

Teachers may award the passes for any behavior or academic related criteria such as perfect attendance, highest number of books read, kind deeds in the classroom, creative science projects, essay contests, etc. The program is intended to award students for making great choices in strides toward academic excellence as well as to give teachers an incentive tool in the classroom. 

  Kaleidoscope FUND RAISER NIGHTS 

Schools and churches now have a GREAT easy way to earn extra funds!  Schedule a fundraiser night for your school and 15% of all admission will go back to your school!  Super easy, super fun!

Museum Hours:

Tues-Thur  10-3pm

Friday-Sat  10-7pm

Sunday  1-6pm

Monday  Closed

• Piaget stressed the importance of learning by doing, especially in science. According to Piaget, "a sufficient experimental training was believed to have been provided as long as the student had been introduced to the results of past experiments or had been allowed to watch demonstration experiments conducted by his teacher, as though it were possible to sit in rows on a wharf and learn to swim merely by watching grown-up swimmers in the water. It is true that this form of instruction by lecture and demonstration has often been supplemented by laboratory work by the students, but the repetition of past experiments is still a long way from being the best way of exciting the spirit of invention, and even of training students in the necessity for checking for verification" (1986, p. 705).
• "Piaget's research clearly mandates that the learning environment should be rich in physical experiences. Involvement, he states, is the key to intellectual development, and for the elementary school child this includes direct physical manipulation of objects" (McAnarney, 1978, p. 33).
• Bruner also stressed learning by doing. "The school boy learning physics is a physicist, and it is easier for him to learn physics behaving like a physicist than doing something else" (Bruner, 1960, p. 14). Bruner states, "Of only one thing I am convinced. I have never seen anybody improve in the art and technique of inquiry by any means other than engaging in inquiry" (1961, p. 31). Bruner points out the quick rate of change in our world and says, "the principal emphasis in education should be placed on skills - skills in handling, in seeing, and imaging, and in symbolic operations" (Bruner, 1983, p. 138).
• A hands-on approach is also advocated by some people who advocate a constructivist approach to science teaching. "Learning is defined as the construction of knowledge as sensory data are given meaning in terms of prior knowledge. Learning always is an interpretive process and always involves construction of knowledge.... Constructivism implies that students require opportunities to experience what they are to learn in a direct way and time to think and make sense of what they are learning. Laboratory activities appeal as a way of allowing students to learn with understanding and, at the same time, engage in a process of constructing knowledge by doing science" (Tobin, 1990, p. 404-405).
• Educational research has shown many advantages of using hands- on science programs. Bredderman (1982) reports the results of a meta-analysis of 15 years of research on activity-based science programs. This synthesis of research was based on approximately 57 studies involving 13, 000 students in 1, 000 classrooms. All of the studies involved comparing activity-based programs (the Elementary Science Study, Science-A Process Approach, or the Science Curriculum Improvement Study) with comparable classrooms using a traditional or textbook approach to science teaching. A variety of student performance measures were analyzed. The most dramatic differences were found in science process skills where the students in activity-based programs performed 20 percentile units higher than the comparison groups. The students in these programs scored higher than the control groups in the following measures (ranked from largest to smallest differences): creativity, attitude, perception, logic development, language development, science content, and mathematics. Students who were disadvantaged economically or academically gained the most from the activity- based programs.
• Hands-on learning has been shown to increase learning and achievement in science content (Bredderman, 1982; Brooks, 1988; Mattheis & Nakayama, 1988; Saunders & Shepardson, 1984).
• Research indicates that activity-based science can improve students' attitudes toward science (Jaus, 1977; Kyle, Bonnstetter, Gadsden, & Shymansky, 1988; Kyle, Bonnstetter, McCloskey, & Fults, 1985; Rowland, 1990). "There seems to be some evidence from exemplary programs that even poorly taught hands-on science is more interesting to students than the typical textbook based program" (Penick & Yager, 1993, p. 5).
• Evidence clearly indicates that hands-on activities increase skill proficiency in processes of science, especially laboratory skills and specific science process skills, such as graphing and interpreting data (Mattheis & Nakayama, 1988).