To assure success for the home portion of your project, prepare simple take-home kits. For this project, these kits should consist of a large envelope containing a ruler, instructions for the experiment, and a suggestion to take pictures if possible. If you cannot prepare a kit for each student, make several and rotate the use of the kits.

These kits will be even more valuable if children know what to say to their parents. Use a student to model the following scene, in which the student plays the role of the parent and you the child. The dialog could be: "Dad, my class is working on an experiment. I need to find out if age affects the results. I have all the materials in this envelope. It will only take a few minutes. When would be a good time for you to help me?"

It would be fun and worthwhile to have members of the class practice this scene with each other. They may even want to write their own script.

Keep in mind that while the final display should represent all the work that has been done, it must tell the story of the project in such a way that it attracts and holds the viewers' interest. Keep it simple. All the information should not be crammed into one place. You can conserve space on the display and still exhibit all the students' efforts by placing much of the work in group journals instead of on the display board itself.

Have each group prepare a short summary paragraph to briefly give an overview of the problem, explain how it was solved, and state the conclusion. Remember, an individual who has no knowledge of the topic should be able to easily understand the basic idea of the project just from reading the summary. Hang one summary under the title and display the others in a notebook. Use removable tape or other temporary means of adhesion so that each group's summary report can be displayed at different times.

I suggest that the title and summary paragraph serve as the main focus at the top of the center panel and that the remaining material be placed neatly from left to right under specific headings. Choices of heading depend on how you wish to display the information, of course, but typically separate headings are used for the problem, hypothesis, procedure, results, and conclusion sections.

While the display should explain everything about the project, each group should be prepared to discuss the project and answer the judges' questions. Encourage students to be proud of their project and approach the judges with enthusiasm about their work. You can instill confidence by dividing the presentation among the students in each group. One can describe the problem being solved, another can briefly describe the procedure, another discuss the results, and another explain the conclusion. Practicing these talks in front of the class helps to "polish" the presentation.

Another way to prepare is to have the entire group answer questions from a student judge. These questions should be selected by the entire class, and you should discuss the appropriate answers before presentations begin. Discourage students from saying "I do not know" in answer to a question. Instead, they can say that they did not discover that answer during their research, and then offer other information that they found of interest about the project.

With the knowledge acquired from the class project, your students are READY- SET, and the next step is GO FOR IT.

Editor's Note: The experiment and ideas for exploring questions in this article were taken from the author's book, Animals: Mind-boggling Experiments You Can Turn Into Science Fair Projects (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1993).