WHAT: NW Noggin @ Sunnyside Environmental School

We did it!

How to visit public schools

WHERE: Sunnyside Environmental School, 3421 SE Salmon St, Portland, OR 97214

WHEN: Tuesday, October 26, 9:45am – noon (arrival and set up @ 9:45am; first class 10 – 10:50am; second class 11 – 11:50am) and again on Thursday (10/28)

Everyone outdoors, fully vaccinated and properly masked.

Contacts: Asa Gervich and Jeremy Thomas, 4th grade teachers

We are thrilled to return LIVE to Jeremy and Asa’s lively classrooms this fall! We’ll make two visits, on Tuesday (10/26) and Thursday (10/28) to consider faces and the brain. We’ll examine faces, make faces, draw faces, consider faces in art and explore how we share our own unique brains through expression.

But we’ll also make brain cells and consider AMAZING questions from 4th graders!

From 4th Grade Teacher Asa Gervich:

Over the past weeks, students have learned about the interplay between their prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and amygdala – and how mindfulness practices can help us self-regulate. Last week, we learned about the Reticular Activating System – and how it can help us sift through myriad sensory inputs to focus on something important – like, how does an NBA player tune out all the zany free-throw distractions happening in the stands? Or, what role did the RAS play in about half of our class not spotting the gorilla in this video? What’s going on with our RAS when we listen to music and can isolate one particular instrument? Can everyone do that? We were thinking that visit #2 would be an awesome time to bring out the brain specimens (give them something to look forward to after visit #1). And, Jeremy put in a vote for that super cool electrical-impulse station if you guys are still doing that…

Some current kid wonderings:

If parts of the brain are damaged or lose function, how does that impact how the body works?
Is the brain actually pink? Why?
Which is more important, the brain or the heart?
How was Albert Einstein’s brain different from other people’s?
If two people were born at the exact time, and they liked the exact same stuff, and thought the same things at the same time – how would their brains be different? Would their brains be different?
How many neural pathways are there in your brain?

Can neural pathways be rebuilt or repaired?
Is your brain like your immune system?
You know how your fingerprints are unique to you – I wonder if your brain is the same way – is everyone’s completely unique
When someone experiences a failure of either brain or heart (or both) and they survive it – how does that happen?
Perhaps the number of pathways is infinite – because you can always learn new things…
If you have learned how to do a thing through mistake-making, and then you had some brain damage, would you be starting from step one to be learning that thing? Would you need to make all those mistakes all over again?
What’s going on with people who have amnesia? Do people ever get amnesia so bad that they don’t know who they are anymore?

Look forward to seeing you all soon!

COMMITTED VOLUNTEERS

1. Bill Griesar, PSU/OHSU/NW Noggin
2. Jeff Leake, PSU/NW Noggin
3. Elana Kananykhina, PSU
4. Britta Harbury, PSU
5. Arielle Isakharov, OHSU
6. Theresa Vu, PSU
7. Aaron Eisen, OHSU
8. Levi Banks, PSU

SEE WHAT WE DID AT SUNNYSIDE BEFORE AND DURING COVID 🦠

Thank You Northwest Noggin!

Neurons in Minecraft & More!

A crayon in Homer’s brain

What about the glia?