Pupils

West Friendship Elementary School pupils put their problem-solving skills to use to win a challenge in the DestiNation Imagination North Central Regional Tournament on March 13 at Loch Raven High School. Participating teams from Baltimore and Howard County elementary and middle schools also included Clemens Crossing Elementary and independent teams made up of pupils from several Howard middle schools, said Jennifer Hays, DestiNation Imagination coordinator for West Friendship. West Friendship Elementary fielded three elementary-level teams of third- through fifth-graders; each accepted a different challenge.

THE EXCITEMENT OF the state elections swept through Oklahoma Road Middle School the day after Election Day last week when social studies teacher Christine Baummer revealed the results of pupil voting to one of her seventh-grade, team 5 classes. Baummer had allowed all 118 pupils on the team to cast ballots in the election for governor and state delegate, two positions she felt would help students understand differences between the two political parties, and give them issues to focus on in the mock voting.

Stacey Baker, 30, has spent her five-year career teaching third-graders at Rock Hall Elementary School, an intimate setting in her Eastern Shore hometown where many pupils - including three of her four children - are taught by those who taught their parents. A candidate for Maryland Teacher of the Year, Baker credits Principal Bess Engle with merging innovation and tradition to boost children in the blue-collar waterfront town to the highest ranks in statewide testing. Among those classroom experiments is a teaching team of Baker and Donna Bedell, a close friend and colleague, who share 48 pupils in casual classrooms where writing is paramount in every lesson and pupils are encouraged to lounge on couches or stuffed chairs.

Last Friday, FOUR teams of Patuxent Valley Middle School pupils answered questions about AfricanAmerican history in the school's Black Saga Competition. The pupils sat on the stage in the school cafeteria. The audience included all the sixth-graders and Jennifer Kaplan's eighth-grade French classes. Kaplan is one of the program's coordinators. For 16 grueling rounds, the young people immersed themselves in 500 years of history. Charles Christian, author of "Black Saga," the book from which the questions were drawn, was the host.

As a visiting author, Margaret Peterson Haddix has been welcomed to schools in many creative ways. Middle-schoolers in Worthington, Ohio, transformed the mother of two into an eighth-grader, complete with gum to smack and a school T-shirt. They were fans of her novel Turnabout, about "unaging." In Granville, Ohio, students bellowed cheers: "Who's the writer that we love? Haddix, H-A-D-D-I-X, Haddix." After this week, Haddix said, East Middle School joins the others on her "Most Memorable Welcome" list.

SPRING HAS sprung. Everything is glorious outdoors, and frustrated gardeners are beginning to see an end to forced inactivity.The sense of exuberant renewal also is being felt in our neighborhood schools.The Bollman Bridge Elementary School student government reports that the "Pasta for Pennies" drive was a success. The school collected $2,740.57 to benefit the Leukemia Society.The 57 cents tacked on to the impressive sum collected by the children is a clue to how the money was raised.It consisted mostly of pennies.

Seventh-graders at Patapsco Middle School have been exploring nature -- in a mobile trailer parked behind the school. Inside the portable classroom, teacher Becky Hawkins has led the pupils in activities to illustrate the ecology of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Hawkins works for the Maryland Agricultural Education Foundation, which supplied the trailer. It has bookshelves and work space. Eight fish tanks, some with aquatic plants and goldfish, stand against the walls. Seventh-grade science teachers Heather Vorhauer and Leora Caporaletti decided to have the trailer come to the school rather than arrange a field trip.

Dylan Elie, a 12-year-old seventh-grader at Dunloggin Middle School, is not crazy about doing yard work at home. But he jumps at the chance to yank tangled, overgrown plants, pick up garbage and beautify the area surrounding a stream in the back of his school. "This is much more fun," the Ellicott City resident said Friday morning, shortly after clearing several types of overgrown vegetation near the stream bank. "My friends are here to help." Since October, 50 seventh-grade science pupils at Dunloggin have gone out once a week and worked to make a half-mile strip of stream that leads to the Chesapeake Bay more environmentally sound.

IMAGINATIVE AND colorful art by North Carroll youth is on display at Hampstead Town Hall through Aug. 24. The 80 works on exhibit include paintings, hand-stitched dolls and papier-mache masks by pupils of Shiloh Middle, Hampstead Elementary and Spring Garden Elementary schools. Second-grade pupils drew portraits of imaginary friends in crayon. Two are by Steven Bollinger and Cassie Smink. Other second-grade works on display include a painting of a leopard by Zach Newton and city scene of cut paper by Tori Zachman.

ANYONE WHO thinks parents have become apathetic toward their children's education should have been at the Marley Elementary Multicultural Millennium Fair last week. The event took place at the adjacent Marley Glen Special School, whose multipurpose room is more than twice the size of Marley Elementary's. Even so, there was a standing-room-only crowd of parents, grandparents and friends. Divided by grade levels, pupils acted out great moments from 1900 through 1999. In one night, we saw Jackie Robinson and Babe Ruth step up to the plate, Elvis Presley gyrate, Rosa Parks refuse to give up her bus seat and Neil Armstrong walk on the moon.