Excitment about up and coming Volunteer Experiences!!!

So March is going to be a fun and interesting month for volunteering for me!

One of the opportunities that I have been doing is Students on the Beamline. An outreach program for high school age students at the Canadian Light Source (CLS). School groups, from across Canada, propose a plan of action with help from CLS staff, on how they can actively conduct research on one of the several beamlines at the CLS.

In January I got to work with a group of students from College Bouret from Montreal Quebec. It proved to be a fun and exciting experience, where the students used the SGM beamline to discover the minerals in a sample collected from a Meteor Impact site, the Manicouagan Crater Basin. What I thought was so great was the enthusiasm that the students had to learn and conduct their own research.

March is going to be a busy month for Students on the beamline. Some of the other school groups that will be coming in March include:
- Effects of UV Light on Plant Cells - Avonlea School-Avonlea, SK
- Headspace of Different Types of Yeast- Victoria Park Collegiate Institute- Toronto
- Vitamins in Juices and Powdered Vitamin Supplements
- Interaction of Bacteria with Nanosilver Particles in Band-Aids

I am going to be helping with a few of these.... so keep posted for some highlights!

Also if you want more information check out this website:
http://www.lightsource.ca/education/students.php

Also in March is Brain Day Week!
Brain Day is a national prevention awareness initiative put on by ThinkFirst Canada. Through this program I, as well as many other volunteers, will get the chance to go into elementary classrooms and educate the students about the human brain and nervous system. The program trains us and provides us with plenty of material and activities to inform the students about how important our brain is and why we should protect it by wearing helmets and such. On March 3 I will attend the training session and then from March 16-20 I will be out in the schools. I am really excited to use hands on activities and experiments to help engage the students and help them understand how the brain works, and the affects that brain injuries can have on people.