---
title: Creative Chemistry Class Gets a Reaction in Local Elementary Schools
date: 2026-05-06T05:30:00-04:00
author: University of Maryland
canonical_url: "https://today.umd.edu/creative-chemistry-class-gets-a-reaction-in-local-elementary-schools"
section: Articles
---
# Creative Chemistry Class Gets a Reaction in Local Elementary Schools

*May 6, 2026* — by [Georgia Jiang](/author/georgia-jiang)


> Undergrads Learn to Share the Wonder of Science With Prince George's Third Graders

*CHEM356 Students Visit School 042426 125 1920x1080 — UMD Chemistry students Caley Navins '26 and Amy Lepore '26 (at right) create an explosion of foam, much to the delight of third graders at Langley Park-McCormick Elementary School. (Photos by Mark Sherwood)*

Ask most people where their love of science began and they usually point to a specific memory: a meteor shower, a nature documentary or a visit to a museum. For Lenea Stocker, a senior lecturer in the University of Maryland’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, it was a high school chemistry class with a teacher who could conjure up lessons that looked like magic.

“[Elephant toothpaste](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/make-elephant-toothpaste/), [carbon snakes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyyXeZry_JU)—all of these neat things that just got me excited about chemistry. I couldn’t stop watching and wondering,” she said.

Decades later, Stocker is channeling that same spark into a one-credit course she launched in 2024, “Chemical Demonstrations and Outreach,” after years of fun chemistry demos for kids at Maryland Day and creating the grant-funded [Kids and Chemistry Demonstration Day](https://chem.umd.edu/about/outreach) program for local elementary school students.

Now, on Friday mornings, Stocker coaches undergraduate students on how to perform chemistry demonstrations that foam, glow, fizz and erupt. Late in the semester, the students take what they learned into local classrooms, sharing the magic with wide-eyed third graders.

For the undergrads, the experience is as much about learning to communicate the science as it is about mastering it, Stocker says—to slow down, find the right words and rediscover what drew them to chemistry in the first place.

 “And for young kids who’ve never seen science in action before, it lets them know that they can learn and play with chemistry too,” Stocker said.

Amy Lepore, a senior double-majoring in chemistry and biological sciences, was drawn to the class because of her interest in teaching.

“What I love is that we have the chance to ask a lot of questions and then test them ourselves. You have so much more fun and learn more when you’re doing it all firsthand,” Lepore said. “We always spend the last part of class making small adjustments to our experiments just to see if anything cool happens. It’s like we get to safely ‘play’ chemistry rather than just following a rigid list of instructions.”

Every week, Stocker guides the class through a new concept and demonstration. She curates the experiments in her syllabus for visual impact, safety and their connection to concepts already encountered in a chemistry classroom—including chemiluminescence (the emission of light from a chemical reaction), redox reactions (reactions in which oxidation states change), gas expansion, thermodynamics and more. Students often get to create keepsakes of their experiments; they have silvered the inside of Erlenmeyer flasks or transformed pennies into what appears to be gold through alloying, taking their results home as souvenirs.


*Elementary school students look a a flask of red liquid during a science demo at their school.*




**Topics:** [Campus & Community](https://today.umd.edu/tags/campus-community)


**Tags:** [Chemistry and Biochemistry](https://today.umd.edu/topic/chemistry-and-biochemistry), [Student Experience](https://today.umd.edu/topic/student-experience)


**Units:** [College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences](https://today.umd.edu/topic/college-computer-mathematical-and-natural-sciences)