Past projects 146
This Solar Event Truly Is Once In A Lifetime
Funded Apr 22, 2012The history surrounding the transit of Venus is astounding. In 1760, Guillaume Le Gentil, a French astronomer set out by ship to observe and measure the transit of Venus from India. Due to the breakout of war between Britain and France, his ship was turned back, and he did not make it in time for the June, 1761 transit. Instead of enduring the long journey back to France he stayed in the Philippines, then returned to India to observe the 1769 transit, the last until 1874. Prepared with telescopes and a newly established observatory, Le Gentil had clear skies the night before, but thick, heavy clouds all during the transit. Twice in 9 years he missed his only chances to see this event, first due to politics, next due to weather. Thankfully, my students had no international conflicts as they moved down to the school yard on June 5th. When we got there however, Le Gentil's second nemesis, clouds, awaited them.
To say the least, my students and I were disappointed that the weather here in the northeast prevented our view of the transit. It was however exciting and encouraging to see what they did with the day, both in the preparation and in the time we did have outside. All week and all day students would excitedly ask me about the announcements posted around school. I even had many volunteers to put together the solarscopes purchased through your donation - students who normally don't have much engagement with textbooks and homework really shone, taking the lead in some cases with constructing these sun viewers.
We tried viewing the sun for a few hours before the event was slated to happen at 6:00 PM, and several students stuck around for a while after that. Each time we waited for a peek of sun to come through the heavy cloud cover. In a day and age where instant gratification is the norm - TV, video games, ipods - it is sometimes difficult to keep students focused on a task for long. That they not only persisted through the difficulties of doing science, but had a good time doing it was affirming for me the power of informal science and citizen science. We had a few peaks of the sun - 1 minute here, 10 minutes there - and each time they stared at the sun with their glasses or ran to the solarscopes to make a clear projection. When the clouds reigned, or rained at some points, we all stuck it out, talking, chasing my 20 month old daughter around the yard, and using the iPad to view parts of the heavens invisible to us. Without the pressure of tests and school, science was just...fun!
We left the day disappointed not to see the event, but with the shared experience of having faced difficult conditions together. I told my students to eat well, exercise, and go to the doctor regularly so they might be around for the next transit in 2117, which is all they can do if they want to see this particular event in their lifetimes. Hopefully though this whets their appetite for more astronomy, and more days outside looking for more of the wonderful phenomena around us. We will certainly use the solarscopes and glasses for more observations, and the iPad for all of the wonderful simulations, ebooks, and other possibilities it holds. We may not have endured the trials of Le Gentil, but we certainly have a story and an experience to share thanks to your generosity. ”
With gratitude,
Mr. Wolf
Cameras for Learning English and Science
Funded Dec 28, 2011I always love writing these thank you letters. In my career and on a day to day basis, I have a long list of people - students, parents, colleagues, family - to thank for getting me to where I am today. Thanks to your donations to my classroom, my list has just gotten a bit longer.
Already these additional cameras have had an impact on my classes. Earlier this month, as part of a college readiness program, we were able to create 10 teams of students, each armed with their own camera for our scavenger hunt on college life at a nearby university. Upon arrival back at school, students spent the next advisory classes combing through a library of over 450 photos taken by themselves, to help create a visual portfolio of college. Many of my students are the first in their families to make it this far in their basic education, so researching college like this is essential to getting them educated and interested in what lies beyond graduation.
In Biology, we have used these cameras to document all of the many steps of our recent "Race...Is it Real?" DNA labs. We are using DNA to answer the question of race, and every student is writing their own scientific paper about their own DNA and their relatedness to others from our class and around the world. Doing the experiments only took a few days, but writing in depth about the experience required much more time. Photos of what they had done were the perfect way to use and reuse new vocabulary. There is also that extra bit of interest because these photos are not of strangers, but themselves and their own experiences. I can assure you that many of my students now have the same level of understanding of how to extract and amplify DNA that many students don't receive until they are well into their undergraduate education.
Your donations make a real and lasting impact on what and how I can teach. Please give yourself a pat on the back for making so many students' educations that much richer. With the crises in education we face today, it sometimes feels as if nothing is going right. Using these cameras to improve our work had and will continue to have an impact for years to come. Please enjoy the photos, all taken by my students with your cameras”
With gratitude,
Mr. Wolf
Cameras for Learning Science and English
Funded Dec 4, 2011I always love writing these thank you letters. In my career and on a day to day basis, I have a long list of people - students, parents, colleagues, family - to thank for getting me to where I am today. Thanks to your donations to my classroom, my list has just gotten a bit longer.
Already these additional cameras have had an impact on my classes. Earlier this month, as part of a college readiness program, we were able to create 10 teams of students, each armed with their own camera for our scavenger hunt on college life at a nearby university. Upon arrival back at school, students spent the next advisory classes combing through a library of over 450 photos taken by themselves, to help create a visual portfolio of college. Many of my students are the first in their families to make it this far in their basic education, so researching college like this is essential to getting them educated and interested in what lies beyond graduation.
In Biology, we have used these cameras to document all of the many steps of our recent "Race...Is it Real?" DNA labs. We are using DNA to answer the question of race, and every student is writing their own scientific paper about their own DNA and their relatedness to others from our class and around the world. Doing the experiments only took a few days, but writing in depth about the experience required much more time. Photos of what they had done were the perfect way to use and reuse new vocabulary. There is also that extra bit of interest because these photos are not of strangers, but themselves and their own experiences. I can assure you that many of my students now have the same level of understanding of how to extract and amplify DNA that many students don't receive until they are well into their undergraduate education.
Your donations make a real and lasting impact on what and how I can teach. Please give your self a pat on the back for making so many students' educations that much richer. With the crises in education we face today, it sometimes feels as if nothing is going right. Using these cameras to improve our work had and will continue to have an impact for years to come. Please enjoy the photos, all taken my my students with your cameras.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Wolf
Science With Style!
Funded Nov 28, 2011This past Wednesday, my Science Challenge Club members and I boarded a train for our first science fair. With posters in tow and some butterflies in the belly, my students made myself and our school proud with excellent presentations and great spirits. As you can see from our photos, that day we stood out among the several schools at the fair not just because of the fruits of our work, but by the shirts on our backs! I think that a lot of the nervousness they felt that day was lessened when they could look around and see so many members of their club unified not just by their work, but by these really snazzy shirts.
The shirts you provided for us certainly stood out among all of the groups in attendance. We received a lot of compliments, and even some "where did you get those?" (I didn't forget to mention Donorschoose.org!). Even the keynote speaker wanted one! In all, my students did a wonderful job presenting their work and are bustling with confidence and excitement as we gear up for the culminating science symposium in late May. They will remember this day forever, and when they picture it, they may not perfectly remember all of the faces or what was said, but they will remember the feelings of the day and the T-shirts we all shared. These are a physical reminder they can always look at to transport them back to this day. I thank you for helping make it unforgettable for them and for me, as well.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Wolf
This classroom project was brought to life by ABC Family and 3 other donors.We'll Find Our Work In A Flash With USB Drives
Funded Oct 26, 2011A whole lot of thanks are due to you, the many donors who made this project a reality. We are finally putting the USB drives you sent to good use, and I see them being used more and more as the year goes on.
As part of our students' graduation requirements, they must create and present a portfolio each semester of their best work. We spend well over a month preparing: we gather and select work from their files, we write, edit, and rewrite essays about what they learned and about their own personal growth. In years past, much of the writing came by hand, which becomes very time consuming when each draft must be written anew. Until your USB drives arrived, only a small handful of students were able to take their work with them for later revision. With new USB drives in hand, nearly every student was using word processing and computers to reduce the amount of time spent on rewriting, allowing them to focus more on the substance of their portfolios. Just a few days ago, these portfolios were presented at small roundtables with other students and at least one teacher. Students dressed up in shirts, ties, and dresses, and just like a masters or doctoral defense, sat and discussed their work in the language of their new home, English. These were some of the best portfolios I have seen. I'd like to think that part of the reason was that they had an added tool, the USB drive, to help them prepare this time around.
As you can also see in the photos we sent to you, students are using these drives for more than just writing. Just a day after portfolio, students were taking pictures of cells in our microscopes and saving them on their USBs as evidence of their observations. Soon, I know we will be using them to save lab reports and save resumes we will work on in Advisory class. By the time students are visiting college fairs in 11th grade, they will have saved a large amount of work and documentation of their learning that they can then share with prospective colleges.
This little do-it-all tool you so generously provided is starting to change the way my students look at work and learning. They are finding it easier to do all their work, and it is thanks to you. Please continue supporting education through this site, your community, and your politicians. We teachers and our students need all the great opportunities available to us because of great folks like you.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Wolf
Save Our Work! USB Drives for College Bound ELLs
Funded Sep 23, 2011A whole lot of thanks are due to you, the many donors who made this project a reality. We are finally putting the USB drives you sent to good use, and I see them being used more and more as the year goes on.
As part of our students' graduation requirements, they must create and present a portfolio each semester of their best work. We spend well over a month preparing: we gather and select work from their files, we write, edit, and rewrite essays about what they learned and about their own personal growth. In years past, much of the writing came by hand, which becomes very time consuming when each draft must be written anew. Until your USB drives arrived, only a small handful of students were able to take their work with them for later revision. With new USB drives in hand, nearly every student was using word processing and computers to reduce the amount of time spent on rewriting, allowing them to focus more on the substance of their portfolios. Just a few days ago, these portfolios were presented at small roundtables with other students and at least one teacher. Students dressed up in shirts, ties, and dresses, and just like a masters or doctoral defense, sat and discussed their work in the language of their new home, English. These were some of the best portfolios I have seen. I'd like to think that part of the reason was that they had an added tool, the USB drive, to help them prepare this time around.
As you can also see in the photos we sent to you, students are using these drives for more than just writing. Just a day after portfolio, students were taking pictures of cells in our microscopes and saving them on their USBs as evidence of their observations. Soon, I know we will be using them to save lab reports and save resumes we will work on in Advisory class. By the time students are visiting college fairs in 11th grade, they will have saved a large amount of work and documentation of their learning that they can then share with prospective colleges.
This little do-it-all tool you so generously provided is starting to change the way my students look at work and learning. They are finding it easier to do all their work, and it is thanks to you. Please continue supporting education through this site, your community, and your politicians. We teachers and our students need all the great opportunities available to us because of great folks like you.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Wolf
Help Us Think Big with a Microscope
Funded Jul 22, 2011This week my students are peering into the objectives of their microscopes, looking at cells undergoing mitosis and meiosis. Normally, when we study these topics, I am met by the stifling of yawns and even a few that are not stifled. Understanding intricate cellular processes is not easy to make accessible and real for many students, and mine are no exception. When I first started teaching, I would rely heavily on textbooks and handouts when I taught this subject. No more. At every opportunity I am trying to get them observing, manipulating and experimenting. One of the challenges with this has always been teaching sound microscope skills and getting us all talking about the same thing. It's never easy to do, especially when students and I are not even in agreement about what we are looking at.
This microscope allows us to take advantage of one of the most fundamental advances in biology - digital photography. As my students are observing in this scope, we also have it connected to the classroom projector. Gone are the days of people looking at air bubbles and cracks on the glass. After seeing and discussing onion cells undergoing mitosis, we are looking forward to later this week when we are expecting the delivery of asexual organisms - hydra and planarians - that we have never studied before. In a classroom where English is the second language, we are all able to communicate clearly while we use this microscope.
In addition to the benefits in my classroom, this scope has already been tested out on studying yeast, an independent research project of one of our more enterprising students. Without this scope's delicate controls for manipulating the stage and light source his ability to quantify his results would simply not happen. Thanks to you, he will likely have a strong entry for the upcoming year's city science and technology fair and it couldn't have been done without you. Your donation is directly responsible for advancing the quality of my teaching and for providing new and exciting opportunities for my students. Thank you for this wonderful contribution to our school. I hope you will continue to support education and the sciences either through Donorschoose.org or any other way that improves educational opportunities for kids. ”
With gratitude,
Mr. Wolf
Amplify Our DNA Projects with PCR Beads
Funded Aug 26, 2011The last several months have been exciting ones in our science lab. We have quickly put your donated PCR beads to use doing real, original science. Several teams of students that participate in our after school Science Challenge Club have piloted a project we hope to do in the future with all of our classes. At the prompting of a science project competition by the world-renowned Cold Spring Harbor Labs, my students formed their own projects around the technique of DNA barcoding - a way of using short DNA sequences to identify species. So far, students have collected dried seahorses and medicinal plants, plucked pigeon feathers from the ground, and ground up spices all in the hopes of answering some fundamental questions: is this the species we think it is? Is it endangered? What's here?
The essential step in this process is the amplification of DNA we have collected and extracted from our samples. Without amplification the amount of DNA we get is too small to observe. Quite literally overnight, we take these extracted samples, mix them together with your PCR beads, and in the morning we have billions of copies of the DNA we want to read. In short, this is work that is not going to take place without your donation.
As we progress further into the spring, my science challenge club members will be bringing the results of these experiments to two citywide science fairs. Your donation is catapulting them on their first steps into potential careers in science. My full classes will also be using these beads soon as we begin to extract and analyze their own DNA. We will tackle the difficult question, "Does race exist?" in science, and as part of their humanities classes as they study colonization in Africa and the Holocaust.
Thank you so much for allowing us to bring these authentic learning opportunities to our students and please continue to to be an advocate for meaningful, impactful education through venues like Donorschoose. ”
With gratitude,
Mr. Wolf
Planning for Success with Daily Planners
Funded Sep 17, 2011Thanks to your generosity, several weeks ago we received 4 heavy boxes of planners. By the end of the week, the boxes were empty - Every student on my team received one of the planners and had already begun filling it with important dates like school holidays, quizzes, and due dates for homeworks. At first it was a slow process, with some students fumbling to find the right page, or asking for white-out to correct where they wrote the wrong date or misplaced an assignment. By the second day though, most were getting the hang of it and quickly writing in their upcoming assignments.
Now that we are several weeks into this experiment, I can say it has made a difference in my classes. Every teacher on the team is using the planner in class, helping make something unfamiliar into almost a second nature. Students who always questioned missed assignments are now at the very least keeping track of what's coming. Many of them are not where I want them to be yet because they are still missing assignments, but I can tell that they can see that place from where they are. Like anything else I teach, this is going to take repetition, but at least now we are able to practice our organizational skills, all thanks to your planners!
Thank you for giving us this invaluable tool for teaching our students how to be better learners. I look forward to sending you soon their thank you letters so you can read about it in their own words.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Wolf
This classroom project was brought to life by Quill.com and 9 other donors.Cameras For Learning Science And English
Funded Apr 18, 2011Let me start by saying thank you one and all for your generous donation to my classroom of these gorgeous cameras. Already your gift has unfettered my students and I, giving us the freedom to take photos when and where we choose. As you see from my photos, my students this last month have been taking photos of our local neighborhood as part of our My Community, My World project. All of the pictures were taken with the cameras we got from Donorschoose. My students found lots of interesting critters and plants in our heavily urbanized neighborhood. They were able to capture most of them without harm thanks to these cameras.
At this early part of the year, many students have little to no English skills to fall back on. All of them however have a rich variety of experiences from their home countries. We decided to make presentations comparing their home cities to our new one here in New York. While planning their presentations this week, we pored over the hundreds of pictures they chose to take. Having the common experience of going into the neighborhood together helped, but having time to really look at their photos allowed them to reconstruct the moment and write about it in English. They even used some photos from their expeditions for math class, calculating proportions and scales of the trees they were standing next to.
It is projects like these they will remember as they build their new life here in America. Thanks to you we had the tools to make it possible. Many more projects like this will be possible this year and for years to come thanks to your donations.”
With gratitude,
Mr. Wolf