“Kids are like giant sponges—if you make it interesting, they can learn anything,” she says, adding, “I've always said, ‘If they can learn bad words, they can learn big ones.’” Mrs. Mary built an entire curriculum around the synthesis of molecules, using the giant models as well as fashioning edible molecules out of colored cookie dough. She also relabeled crayons, so red became oxygen and black became carbon.

When Mrs. Mary and the kids got bored with building simple molecules like water and carbon dioxide, she called her son for more ideas. Claiming to be busy saving the world from missing proteins, Marty sent her Molecules That Changed the World by chemist K.C. Nicolaou. The book starts with the first molecule ever synthesized: urea, an immediate hit.

“If you can somehow work ‘pee’ into the conversation, that's instant success with preschoolers,” says Marty, who grew up in and worked as a teenager at Little People's Place.

His mom hopes her efforts will set the stage for her students to follow through on an interest in science later in life. When she recently asked five-year-old Ben Weller what he remembered about the chemistry lessons, he said, “Mrs. Mary, when I went to kindergarten they made me put all this stuff in my head, and your stuff fell out!” But when she pulled out the Nicolaou book, he flipped to the right page for building urea, grabbed the giant stick and brightly colored balls and got down to some serious play.

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