This year, for the first time, we're offering after-school science classes for children age 7-12 right here in our laboratory classroom.

In this fascinating place, our innovative, exciting, project-oriented curriculum covers a wide variety of science topics such as electricity and magnetism, engineering, potential and kinetic energy, chemistry, and physics. See our facility.

Our laboratory contains equipment that we don’t take to schools, so on-site students often have the chance to do experiments they would usually never see until college, including exploding bubbles, million-volt lightning bolts, chemistry with real chemicals, and hundreds of other experiments that have been created in our lab.

Many of our on-site lessons are different from the ones we present at regular schools, because they are still being developed and fine-tuned. As a result, the instructor often departs from the planned curriculum to adapt to the responses of the students. He may create a new experiment just hours before a class, or fabricate a new story on the fly, incorporating story elements suggested by the students themselves. So there are often delightful surprises and unexpected discoveries in these classes.

The instructor for After-School classes is Greg Austin. For the past six years, Greg has been teaching Rock-it Science lessons in public and private schools, Boys & Girls Clubs, and summer camps. An imaginative storyteller, Greg delights students with his science lessons presented in the humorous, exciting Rock-it Science style.

Parents are welcome to observe the classes and take notes if you’d like to explore the topic further at home. For the students themselves, however, there’s no note-taking, no memorization, no homework, and no tests. In this stress-free environment, they get to try things, make mistakes, make corrections, and discover how to solve problems, without the risk of being “wrong.” This develops and maintains their enthusiasm for science, which is our primary objective. Learn more about our unique method of teaching.

Classes begin on time, so be sure to arrive on time. In the first ten or fifteen minutes of the class, we introduce the basic concepts of the lesson, followed by the story, then the hands-on experiment. If a child is late and misses the introduction, they will still enjoy and learn from the rest of the lesson, but they may not understand the context, and they may miss important instructions about the experiment.

Afterwards, it may take some time for a child to process what they’ve experienced during the lesson, so please resist the urge to test your child’s retention of facts or concepts following the class. Instead, invite them to draw a picture about what they did in the lesson, or write a story about it as if they were writing to a penpal. They may also wish to write their own ending to the “Jack and Jill” story from the lesson.