No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The work of the Educational Department is in full swing, booking reservations and conducting groups on visits to the Museum, Planetarium and Dairy Dell. In anticipation of the busy fall season, two separate mailings have been prepared and sent out to a mailing list which includes over 1500 schools and several hundred administrators. Student tickets and teachers' identification cards, in sufficient numbers to take care of the student enrollment and faculty of each school have been sent out, along with information concerning group visits.
The second mailing consisted of the schedule of special school demonstrations in the Fels Planetarium for the First Semester. Many reservations were made for these shows in the first week of school sessions, with one teacher asking, on the 14th of September, for a booking in the Christmas show.
Because of the extreme popularity of these planetarium shows, and the necessity in previous years of turning so many groups away, many additional lectures have been scheduled for this season. Demonstrations are now given on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday mornings and on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons.
The Department is continuing to sponsor, in cooperation with the Board of Education and Station WFIL, the school radio program "Science is Fun." In connection with this weekly program, a teachers' manual is prepared and mailed out to all schools on the mailing list. This manual is designed to help teachers in preparing their classes to listen more profitably to the broadcasts, and contains suggestions for experiments children can do at home or in the classroom, vocabulary, and material tying in study visits to The Franklin Institute with the subjects in the weekly radio programs. The 1948-49 manual was prepared and mailed out in the early part of the fall semester.
The Director of Education expects this year, as in the past, to have many conferences with teachers and department heads in connection with specialized teaching problems, and to continue to work with teachers colleges and schools of education.
Cooperation with the Philadelphia Science Council, the United Nations Youth Council and many other organizations will be continued this year.
๐ SIMILAR VOLUMES
Science and technology know no geographical boundaries. The horizons are limited only by man's ingenuity and the materials with which he has to work. One of the most striking examples of what ingenious man can do to emulate and even surpass nature in the provision of useful things is exemplified in
The fears of many people who imagine that, by developing nuclear fission for the purpose of making destructive atomic bombs, the United States had seized a bear by the tail, will be set at rest by the exhibition planned for display in the Museum during the months of November, December, and January.