Lorraine Mann: From Goats to Keisha the Worm, an Excitement for all the World Around Us!

Lorraine Mann: From Goats to Keisha the Worm, an Excitement for all the World Around Us!

Lorraine Mann has been teaching at Prescott Elementary School for fourteen years, bringing her enthusiastic do-it-yourself attitude to a new generation of students through hands-on learning projects and her opening of an outdoor Science Nature Area in the kindergarten’s playground .

May 7, 2020

We are thrilled to recognize Lorraine Mann, Transitional Kindergarten teacher at Prescott Elementary in Oakland, as a 2020 Science Super Star!

Lorraine and her students reflected on the way we see ourselves and each other and debunking popular misconceptions in a lesson she crafted on skin color.

She introduced this topic by dressing as Barbara Henry, Ruby Bridges’ school-teacher on Halloween, and opened a discussion on segregation. Lorraine asked her students to describe skin color and many of them reported that they had black or white skin. Lorraine then had them compare their skin to black/white paper, and students realized that everyone’s skin has all kinds of colors on it!

Later in the year, they read a book about skin tones, The Colors of Us, in which a girl mixed colors to accurately paint her friends. Lorraine’s students wanted to try it, so they did. Many were surprised to see that red made up a lot of everyone’s skin. They experimented with colors, and generally understood that mixing white would make the color lighter, and black darker.

Every student had an opportunity to create their own unique skin tone, and got to give it a name (and got creative with it, coming up with names like peanut butter and pickle)

Lorraine wanted to create a lesson where all students felt included, to show how science can give a further sense to who we are, to highlight the similarities of who we are even if we don’t look the same, and to prove that we are not something just because someone else tells us we are.

Lorraine shared a helpful tip to teachers who want to teach more science (that we love): “Get your kids outdoors!” She expands on the value with the illustration of one student: “I have a special needs student who had a very hard time transitioning to the classroom in the beginning of the year (and still does occaisonally.) When he is having a hard morning, we start the day on the nature yard. Being among the trees and exploring with the science tools helps him calm down and find something interesting to investigate.”

You can read our full-length feature on Lorraine from February 2012 below!

    Lorraine Mann spent her childhood on a farm, playing outdoors, climbing trees, helping her dad build structures, and raising animals. She considered being a veterinarian when she experienced nursing her goat back to health after she had been attacked by a pack of dogs, but realized that while it was quite the science experiment watching the work of the antibiotics that she had to squirt daily into the goat’s trachea, she had another calling in life. For fourteen years now, Lorraine has been teaching kids at Prescott Elementary School, bringing her enthusiastic do-it-yourself attitude to a new generation of students.

Last year she opened an outdoor Science Nature Area in the kindergarten’s playground and has loved watching its effect on the kids. She has noticed that kids who often used to get in trouble in the playground have been particularly drawn to the area, which has offered an alternative, peaceful space allowing the students to forget everything else and focus entirely on scientific exploration.

Learning is a part of all scientific endeavors and Lorraine remembers as a child that in one science lesson in which they all had candles, one fell over onto the paper beneath it, setting the whole thing in flames! In her own classroom she has learned that color mixing tempura paint with a large room of kindergartners is not the way to go. One lesson that she remembers particularly fondly though was the first year that her class studied worms. She recalls that the girls were so excited that they gave the worms individual names such as “Keisha” and believed they could tell them apart!

In her spare time, Lorraine still enjoys actively engaging with the world around her. She is an active gardener and loves harvesting fruits and vegetables to make delicious meals with her son. She also enjoys the knitting techniques she learned from her grandmother and finds the practice to be a meditative experience that involves spatial reasoning, pattern, measurement, and geometry. One of her favorite classes that she took at UC Berkeley was the science class, Botany for Non-Majors. The teacher was committed and enthusiastic and this class taught her that science at any level can be magical and stimulating. Lorraine has truly brought this appreciation for life to her own students. She has noted that, “In [her] 14 years of teaching, science has always been the “hook” that gets [her] students excited about school!”