IN THE CLASSROOM:

When Brenda Mendoza was younger she would play teacher with her siblings and cousins. She liked the idea of educating, taking care of people, and providing those around her with new ideas.

At Paularino Elementary on Monday, Brenda got to continue what she started doing as a young girl when she and some of her fellow students from Estancia High School presented a science lesson to the children at the school.

“It was challenging,” Mendoza, 18, said. “We try to get kids the right information.”

Mendoza and more than 20 other Estancia students put together a PowerPoint presentation and work sheet activities revolving around telescopes for the children to enjoy. The students had the children look into the history of the telescope, starting with Galileo Galilei’s contributions and took the children through a lesson that demonstrated a telescope’s benefits: peering into outer space, studying the sun and planets and learning about Earth.

“The kids over here love the fact that the high school kids are here,” Estancia teacher John Carpenter said. “It’s a fun thing to teach.”

Carpenter brought a telescope from Estancia to Paularino to give the students the opportunity to see what the viewing device can do.

On what was a cloudy morning in Costa Mesa, the children got to see the pulleys, cables and parts of a crane far off in the distance.

The Estancia students are part of a program called Project Tomorrow, which was created by the team of Cal State Fullerton and Regional Occupational Programs, or ROP.

The program gives students the chance to test out a career in teaching by having them come together to build lesson plans and then teach that lesson plan to elementary school children.

The program, in its second year, also provides scholarships for some of its participating students.

“At first it was really nerve wracking,” said Mendoza, a scholarship recipient. “But now I know what it’s really like in the classroom.”

The students are initially split into groups after a general subject is decided on for the lesson. Each group develops a plan and they reconvene to develop a full-scale “super plan,” according to Carpenter. Then the teams split back up for the day of teaching and each group is assigned a class to teach.

“We are catching them in high school,” Carpenter said of the students who are interested in teaching careers.

“We even have had elementary school kids saying they want to be a teacher.”

DANIEL TEDFORD may be reached at (714) 966-4632 or at [email protected].