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September 26, 2000 A SPECIAL EVENT FOR PARENTS AND CHILDREN MARKS THE LAUNCH OF A NEW TEACHER-TRAINING CENTER FOR STANISLAUS COUNTY Parents and children are invited to attend a community-wide BUILD IT! FESTIVAL on October 7, at the Stanislaus County Office of Education at 1100 H Street in Modesto. The festival will run from 10am to 2pm and will contain a number of challenging, educational and fun hands-on activities related to geometry, spatial visualization, construction, and other math concepts. Activities will include building towers out of newspaper dowels, creative tessellations, making polyhedra, and exploring symmetry. These compelling and constructive challenges provide active and creative mathematical learning. This kick-off event will mark the opening of a new Great Explorations in Math and Science (GEMS) Center that will offer training and support for science and mathematics teaching in Stanislaus county. The Stanislaus County GEMS Center will be the fifth GEMS Center established in the Central Valley, and is part of the University of California at Merced's effort to raise the academic achievement of area students in advance of the opening of the new campus in 2004. UC Merced will have a strong emphasis on science and engineering. The Stanislaus County GEMS Center will be offering a series of intensive workshops to train select teachers in effective, researched-based mathematics and science teaching methods developed at the University of California at Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science and published by the GEMS program. Teachers who go through workshops at the Center will then return to their own schools to train other teachers and implement the new teaching strategies. The new center is the result of a collaborative effort between the University of California at Merced, the GEMS Program of the University of California at Berkeley's Lawrence Hall of Science, and the Stanislaus County Office of Education. GEMS is a growing resource for content-rich, inquiry-based science and mathematics education. Tested in thousands of classrooms nationwide, over 70 GEMS Teacher's Guides and Handbooks offer a wide spectrum of learning opportunities from Preschool and Kindergarten through 8th grade. Since the early 1990's, over 8,000 teachers in the Central Valley and over 600,000 teachers worldwide have experienced the GEMS program. For more information on the event, the opening of the GEMS Center, or the GEMS Program, please contact: Matthew Osborn
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