News Photo by Reagan Voetberg Besser Museum Executive Director Chris Witulski teaches students about the pendulum on Wednesday at the Besser Museum.

ALPENA — A grant-funded summer learning opportunity is helping kids stay on top of their skills over break.

Besser Museum for Northeast Michigan is hosting four summer fun and learning sessions for Alpena Public Schools students entering fourth through sixth grades. The sessions are funded by the MI Kids Back on Track grant. The funds are designed to address unfinished learning, get students to grade-level academic standards, provide additional academic assistance to students at risk of falling behind their peers, or help high school students prepare for post-secondary education, according to the Michigan Department of Education website.

Session two took place on Wednesday. Besser Museum Executive Director Chris Witulski began the session, titled Habitat Earth, by teaching the kids about the importance of trees and the benefits they bring, as well as tree anatomy.

The kids then went into the planetarium to watch the Habitat Earth documentary, where they learned about how animals, people, and habitats throughout the world are connected. The documentary taught the students about ocean species as well as how forests regulate climate and help produce rain, Witulski said.

After the documentary Witulski walked the kids through a few exhibits in the museum. In the lower level, she explained how the pendulum proved to scientists that the earth spins, rather than the planets and stars spinning around the earth.

“(People) thought that the earth was in the middle of the universe, and everything was spinning around the earth,” she said. “And that was their theory back then. So, a couple scientists, like Galileo and Copernicus, said no, we are not at the center of the universe. The sun is at the center of the universe.”

She continued, “Galileo invented the telescope … and he looked in with his telescope and he saw everything spinning around, and he said we are not the center of the universe, the sun is the center and everything’s spinning around it.”

“We cannot feel or see the earth spinning, but it spins at about 1,000 miles an hour,” Witulski told the kids.

She explained more about the pendulum at the museum.

“Jean Foucault was an inventor, and he invented the pendulum … and what it proves is that the earth is spinning and how it proves is up at the top is a special collar, I call it, that is connected to a point that is free of the gravitational pull, and then the string and the bob,” she said. “So anything that is at a point with a string and has a ball in the end is a pendulum … Our bob happens to weigh 335 pounds, I think it is. It is a hollow brass, it’s very heavy.”

Foucault’s pendulum drew lines in the sand that proved that the earth was spinning underneath the pendulum.

Witulski had the kids look around the lower level at the dioramas of animals in their natural habitats. Then, they made dioramas of their own out of cardboard pizza boxes and animal cutouts.

“It’s to help that learning gap that children experience during summer,” Witulski said about the summer learning sessions. “They lose a lot of their math, and they lose a lot of their reading … they can end up losing a couple months, two to three months, and having to, like, start over.”

The summer learning at Besser Museum has four sessions this summer. The first session, Great Lakes Fisheries, took place on July 23. Students learned about the Great Lakes Fisheries heritage, the threat of invasive species, the scientific methods used to protect our natural resources, and fun facts about fish anatomy. They also toured two historical maritime vessels.

Two more sessions will be happening on Wednesday and on Aug. 13. Session three will be about fossils and dinosaurs, and session four will be about telescopes and observations.

Contact Besser Museum to register at 989-356-2202.

Reagan Voetberg can be reached at 989-358-5683 or rvoetberg@TheAlpenaNews.com.