Past projects 3
Friday Coffee Cart
Funded Nov 8, 2023Thank you so much for the kind donation. With your help our students with special needs are a more integrated part of our school community.
Each week students prepared cookie dough and bake cookies in the oven you so generously donated. Every Friday, the Northside coffee cart visits teachers with coffee and cookies so that students can practice real world skills in an interactive and dynamic environment.
Students are learning basic food preparation, business systems, and interpersonal skills that will serve them well in the future.”
With gratitude,
Ms. Garner
Using Manipulatives in Biology to Deepen Understanding: Pt 2
Funded Oct 15, 2013Thank you again for your generous contribution to my biology classroom.
The color ink you provided has brought biology to life for my students. Because of the color ink, my students are able to develop a sense of visual wonder about the natural world around us. From bold diagrams that use color to reinforce critical content and vocabulary to real photographs that exemplify the material we discuss daily, color graphics allow my students to connect with the study of life.
My students love looking at the color graphics and photos that fuse their tangible world to the one we are learning about in class. Everyday students are fascinated by the images they interact with and regularly comment on how much easier it is to understand color graphics and pictures than ones that are in black & white. In a subject area where each small part matters, color really allows students to identify, compare, contrast, analyze, and synthesize.
Color manipulatives make my teaching stronger and my students smarter. Thanks again!”
With gratitude,
Ms. Garner
Using Manipulatives To Make Biology Concrete
Funded Oct 10, 2012Thank you so much for your generous donation to our classroom project: Using Manipulatives to Make Biology Concrete. With your financial support, I have been able to make biology "pop" using colorful and relevant images printed on our color printer.
In the past few months, students have participated in numerous activities that have allowed them to interact with color images produced thanks to our project printer. Through these activities, students have been able to interact and master more than two hundred biology terms covering eight major biology topics. For eight years I used black and white manipulatives to help students interact with content and have noticed a significant increase in student interest, curiosity, awareness, and ability to connect now that I am able to use color images in these activities. In addition, color allows me to provide visual cues to students who may need additional help in our differentiated classroom.
Our most exciting use of the printer this year has been in making "My Neighborhood" Brochures. In this end-of-unit project, students were required to investigate the ecology of their neighborhood and present their findings in an informative brochure that tied together all of the topics we studied in our ecology unit. Based on project student reflections, many students said that their favorite part of this project was researching, finding, and sharing images of all of the native wildlife that exists around us. Located just a few miles from downtown, many students did not realize that we are integral parts of important ecological relationships and interactions happening all around us.
The project and the color printer played a major role in opening my students' eyes to the fact that biology is everywhere including inside of them and around them. The material students learned in the community brochure project has led them to make connections between complex topics and guided them in thinking about meaningful questions such as, "what is my role in my environment?," "how am I connected to other living things in my surroundings?," and "what does interdependence mean to me?" It seems so simple but color images have played a powerful role in guiding students through this cognitive leap.
Thank you again for your meaningful contribution to our learning process. Through our new classroom color printer, biology has come alive for my students!”
With gratitude,
Ms. Garner