Standing in front of a packed classroom on Tuesday, Lyman Briggs professor Walter Benenson described how sound waves travel through the air with help from Lyman Briggs sophomore Katie Knauf.

Instead of teaching in his usual lecture hall filled with undergraduate students carefully taking notes, Benenson was a guest speaker in Sandra Donaldson's second-grade classroom at Cavanaugh Elementary School, 300 W. Cavanaugh Road in Lansing.

Benenson demonstrated how to use various instruments and tools in recording and displaying sound waves and decibels. Knauf was a volunteer from one of Benenson's honors classes.

Second-grader Satiadra Wheeler was asked to cough into a microphone connected to a machine that displayed her sound waves digitally.

"It was fun to cough to see how loud I was," she said.

Her classmate, Alyssa Bos, said some of the noises the instruments made were irritating, but she still managed to learn a lot.

"The siren ball thing was very loud and annoying," Bos said. "But I had fun. I liked seeing the vibrations, and I thought he was funny."

Benenson said the second- graders were more responsive to his lecture than the college-age students normally are in his everyday classes.

"With (college students), you're practically dragging the answers out through their noses to get them to volunteer in class. But with (the second-graders), you have to hold them back - they're that excited," he said, adding that the reason the second graders were interested in his experiments and demonstrations was because they still are able to get excited about learning.

When Donaldson's student teacher, MSU alumna Jennifer Jones, began teaching the second- graders about sound, she decided to invite Benenson to present to the class.

"He's a great person that's already familiar dealing with kids. With (teaching) sound, there's nothing that I could really show, myself," Jones said.

After Jones finishes her one-year internship at the elementary school, she will receive her teaching certificate. She said she is gaining beneficial experience by working with Donaldson's class.

"It's good to get all the norms of the classroom established," Jones said.

Donaldson said she appreciated Jones' efforts in setting up the event and thought the kids enjoyed Benenson's presentation.

"It was really all my intern's work in bringing him in," Donaldson said. "The kids were very enthusiastic about it."