Welcome to the Crystal Ball Science Website!

This website was developed for elementary teachers to use as a resource for hands on  science. Please visit often because there will be frequent additions and updates. At this time it is not quite finished, but I'll continue to work at it. My goal is to make this site a valuable resource for everyone who teaches Elementary Science.

Copernicus, an ancient astronomer, was persecuted and almost killed because he insisted that the Earth revolved around the sun.  They almost killed him because he refused to accept the truth of his time that the Earth was the center of the universe.  How do you and I know that what’s in our textbooks now is not just as critically flawed, because of some new, not yet developed truth?  What happens to our kids if we only give them the answers and the answers change?

    If we teach answers and the answers change, our kids are dead in the water.  If we teach them how to find the answers, even if those answers change,  which they surely will as technology progresses, they’ll be okay.  They’ll just find new answers, just like we taught them.

    So bite your tongue while your students are exploring.  If you see that their reasoning is taking them in an obviously wrong direction, ask them questions that will point out why that direction is invalid, and let THEM find their own way.  Then the process, the learning and the knowledge are theirs and theirs alone.  It will be something that they have worked for, invested in, and can be part of their integrity and validation of themselves.  It is at that exact point in time that you will realize that you have changed the world for the better....one student at a time.

     Linda Smith is currently the Elementary Science Resource Specialist for the Paulsboro School District in Gloucester County. Her job is to teach teachers how to do Hands-On Science in their classrooms.  Currently she visits 40 Classes/700 students biweekly to demonstrate hands-on science lessons.  She does inservice workshops for both her district teachers and for state and national teacher organizations.  In addition to her classroom duties, Linda coordinates her school’s annual Science Fair and has partnered with Mobil Exxon and Valero to have Scientists come after school weekly to help students with their projects.  She also runs the school’s annual Space Camp  and advises the elementary school yearbook.

     Linda received her B/A in Elementary Education from Glassboro State College in 1978. In 1995 she received a scholarship to train with NASA astronauts at the Goddard Space Center in Maryland for two weeks in their NEWMAST Program.  She spent a summer as an intern for PSE&G in their Estuary Enhancement Program where she help with a mitigation project to restore 50,000 acres of wetlands.  During that time she also put together the Wetlands Discovery Kits and created a network where every teacher in Salem, Cumberland and Cape May Counties can borrow the kits free of charge through their County Video Libraries. 

     Smith is a State facilitator for the national environmental programs Project WET, Project Wild, Aquatic Wild, Learning Tree, Bridges to the Natural World, and WOW; a member of the state environmental education advisory board, NJNREC; Gloucester County’s Keyleader in the National Building a Presence for Science program, President and newsletter editor for the Council of Elementary Science–New Jersey, is on the Board of Directors for NJ BISEC and it's current President Elect, and sat on a panel to norm the state ESPA test this summer and last.  In 1999 Linda Smith was awarded the Presidential Award for Excellence in Teaching Math & Science.