What is the Young Explorer’s Club?
The Young Explorers’ Club is all about meetings, engaging activities and atmosphere! Children and young people can experiment together under the guidance of the Supervisors. In this way, they acquire knowledge on their own. There are several hundred such clubs throughout Poland and abroad. The Copernicus Science Centre – the programme coordinator – enhances the development of KMOs with the support of the Polish-American Freedom Foundation’s Strategic Partner.
KMO – what is important here?
- During meetings, personal involvement is paramount.
- Club members look for topics of interest themselves, rather than looking at a textbook.
- Participants find answers through experimentation.
- The key is the scientific method, which develops multiple competences and abilities at the same time, allows crossing school boundaries between subjects and shows that making mistakes is valuable insofar as it teaches problem solving. The subject of such investigations – depending on the age of the children – can be experiments with magnets, observations of the Cosmos or analysing the purity of the water in a nearby river.
Simple club rules
- You don’t need a lot of money or even a specially equipped laboratory to do interesting and serious experiments. The objects around us, available in the kitchen, garage, on a walk or in the garden, are tools for experimentation.
- Theclub can be set up anywhere: in the countryside and in the city, in Poland and abroad, in kindergartens, schools and quite apart from the formal education system.
- The tutor can be a teacher, a cultural animator, a parent, and they can be run by anyone – even, as in clubs in Belarus, by older children for younger ones. KMO tutors are people who are active by nature and are not content with ready-made solutions. They consciously allow club members to explore and discover on their own.
- With KMO, teachers can go beyond the core curriculum.
- Club rules – KMO Programme Charter
- See the first steps at the club