IN THE CLASSROOM:Web-savvy students expand horizons

If students at Andersen Elementary School get the hiccups this spring, they won’t need to consult the school nurse for a cure. They can just track down Liliana Dawidoff.

The fifth-grader, along with her classmates, was assigned to do an independent study project this month on a topic of her choice. Each student had to pinpoint a topic, formulate at least three questions about it, then research it and make a presentation to the class.

Liliana, for her project, opted to do a public service of sorts. She scoured the Internet for popular cures to hiccups, then surveyed fellow students to see which ones worked best for them. In the end, drinking a glass of water upside down proved to be the most popular — although brushing one’s teeth and “sucking on a lemon wedge coated with three to four dashes of Angostura bitters” finished not far behind.

“I get hiccups a lot, and I just wanted to find cures that could stop it,” Liliana, 11, said.

From hiccups to Gwen Stefani to Fenway Park, students in Kim Dodds’ class let their imaginations run wild over the last month.

On Wednesday evening, some of their projects, along with others from the Newport-Mesa Unified School District’s Gifted and Talented Education program, went on display at the Costa Mesa Neighborhood Community Center.

Dodds’ students created their projects in different media, with some making PowerPoints, iMovies, books or poster boards.

Claudia Noto, who studied Pablo Picasso’s paintings, made a mock “art box” for her subject, containing prints of his pictures and even pretend correspondence with critics and art dealers.

Claudia, who visited the Musée Picasso in Paris last summer, said studying Picasso has given her a number of insights into her favorite artist — and not all of them were complimentary.

“I learned that Picasso wasn’t a very nice man,” Claudia, 11, said. “You wouldn’t get that from looking at his art.”

Dodds said part of the reason for the projects was to divert Internet-savvy students to other forms of research.

“I introduced them to the concept of an encyclopedia, because they’re so used to Googling everything,” she said.