Mrs. Kugelman's Classroom Edit display name

Past projects 264

• Books: Learning About Animal Adaptations by Focusing on Penguins!

  Funded Oct 18, 2017

  Thank you so much for helping us get a class set of the books, Penguin Chick, and March of the Penguins The Official Children's Book. We have learned so much about the adaptations of the Emperor Penguin from these books. Your generosity means so much to us.

  My students have selected a different penguin to research and create a PowerPoint/Keynote on. They are third graders, yet have grasped how to use gradient colors for the background, added photos behind text, and learned how to do research for their presentation. Because of these books, my students are motivated to learn how similar their penguin is to the Emperor penguin. The sheet of paper the students are holding up is a penguin adaptation chart they illustrated and added facts to. As you can tell, we love learning about penguins! Thank you again for these great books! We will add a literature component as my students compare and contrast the penguin they are researching to the Emperor penguin.”

  With gratitude,

  Mrs. Kugelman

  This classroom project was brought to life by The DonorsChoose.org Community and 6 other donors.

• Books Part 2 : Learning About Animal Adaptations with Penguins

  Funded Oct 18, 2017

  Thank you so much for helping us get a class set of the books, Penguin Chick, and March of the Penguins The Official Children's Book. We have learned so much about the adaptations of the Emperor Penguin from these books. Your generosity means so much to us.

  My students have selected a different penguin to research and create a PowerPoint/Keynote on. They are third graders, yet have grasped how to use gradient colors for the background, added photos behind text, and learned how to do research for their presentation. Because of these books, my students are motivated to learn how similar their penguin is to the Emperor penguin. The sheet of paper the students are holding up is a penguin adaptation chart they illustrated and added facts to. As you can tell, we love learning about penguins! Thank you again for these great books! We will add a literature component as my students compare and contrast the penguin they are researching to the Emperor penguin.”

  With gratitude,

  Mrs. Kugelman

  This classroom project was brought to life by The DonorsChoose.org Community and 5 other donors.

• Owl Pellets + the Novel Poppy + Watercolors = STEAM!

  Funded Sep 25, 2017

  Thank you so much for donating to our project. My students were so delightfully engaged dissecting owl pellets. We looked at very small teeth from the rodents, organized the body parts to determine which animals the owl had eaten, and then the students worked together to create fantasy animals with the bones glued to black paper.

  We are almost finished reading the Witches, which everyone, including me love. Then we will dive into Poppy. This is a great story of a brave mouse who must protect her family from the evil and predatory owl. Having a class set of this novel is fantastic, and I know my third graders will read this book annually. Thank you!”

  With gratitude,

  Mrs. Kugelman

• Parents Help Grow School Vegetables PLUS Our Vertical Garden Experiment!

  Funded Apr 4, 2017

  Thanks again for donating to our Vertical Garden project. My have spent hours this week getting the vertical garden tower built and filled with potting soil. We have not yet had a chance to fill the inner core with worms for composting. That will be next week's hands-on lesson!

  Building and using our vertical garden has been a fun and great hands-on science project. Today we planted seeds in both the vertical garden and our school garden bed. We are performing a science experiment where we are comparing which environment is best for growing organic vegetables from seeds.

  My students loved adding the potting soil and watering the layers of soil - 6 cubic feet in all! We planted colorful beans on the top level, and students selected which pocket and seeds they wanted to plant in the vertical garden. We labeled each pockets with each student's name and the name of the vegetable they were growing. There are so many pockets that we have not used them all! The students love knowing where "their" seeds are growing. This is a special feature of the vertical garden that I did not plan on! Thank goodness for freezer tape and Sharpies so we can label everything!

  We are also germinating seeds by placing seeds on a wet paper towel and keeping this in a Ziploc bag. Each student has their labeled bag on their desk and they are hypothesizing which day germination will occur. After the seeds germinate and the plant begins to grow, we will transplant the plants to different pockets in our vertical garden.

  We also put two bags of seeds in a dark closet to see if the leaves would be green or white. This gardening experience has provided some great science and gardening connections. Thanks for your help in making our project come alive!”

  With gratitude,

  Mrs. Kugelman

  This classroom project was brought to life by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and 2 other donors.

• Third Graders Want to Learn Financial Literacy with Hands-On Manipulatives

  Funded Sep 21, 2017

  The extra large magnetic currency is a huge hit in our classroom! Whenever there is free time, my students ask me to get out the currency and write a number on the board so they can take the money and place it on the board until their currency matches the number I write on the board. This is a great tool for addition practice, and to help my third graders gain financial literacy by working with different types of currency. The bills and the coins are very realistic looking, except for the extra large size. The large size helps everyone in the class check the work of students placing the total currency on our magnetic whiteboard. Our thanks to Charles Schwab for matching donations to our project. This resource is something we will be using for a very long time! The calculators are great also because my students can easily check their work. They love using the calculators.”

  With gratitude,

  Mrs. Kugelman

  This classroom project was brought to life by Charles Schwab and 5 other donors.

• My Students Need Ink So They Can Think and Print!

  Funded Sep 15, 2017

  We love our classroom printer. Our school no longer provides toner for our printer, so having extra toner from this project enables me to print my student's essays, the quotes of the week which they work on at home and email to our classroom Gmail page, and the handouts I create. This week I found some great, funny poems online and printed them for my students to practice reciting in teams in front of the class. Our printer is available all day long, and in the spring, our printer will be used to print out my students' original stories which will be sent to a book publisher so the stories can be bound into a hardcover book! Thank you helping us to have enough ink to help us think (and print too!)”

  With gratitude,

  Mrs. Kugelman

  This classroom project was brought to life by An Anonymous Funder and 2 other donors.

• We Need to Safely Store and Charge our Laptops!

  Funded Sep 11, 2017

  We fell in love with our Chromebook cart, so one day I checked to see if the cart could hold our MacBook Pro laptops too! Perfect fit. So now, I have a student set up our laptop charging cart. What a difference this cart makes!

  Our MacBooks are wonderful, but they need to be charged. Before, I had to walk around the class carefully because my students were sitting close to electricity outlets charging their laptops. Now, we have 6 charged laptops, each in its own section of the cart, ready for use. We even have one location on the cart for our newer laptop which has a different style of charger connection. My class looks more organized and my students do not have to ask me to find a charger for each laptop. My students can work at their desks, on the floor, anywhere they want because their laptop is fully charged. Plus, when it is time to put them away for recess, we have a great cart to store and charge the laptops for use later in the day.

  This simple cart has changed our classroom for the better. Thank you so much for your help!”

  With gratitude,

  Mrs. Kugelman

  This classroom project was brought to life by An Anonymous Funder and 3 other donors.

• We Need a Charging Cart for Our Chromebooks

  Funded Aug 24, 2017

  Every morning my students help set up our Chromebook charging cart. What a difference this cart makes! Before I had to walk around the class carefully because my students were sitting close to electricity outlets charging their Chromebooks. Now, we have 6 charged Chromebooks, each in its own section of the cart, ready for use. My class looks more organized and my students do not have to ask me to find the correct charger for each Chromebook.

  This simple cart has changed our classroom for the better. Thank you so much for your help!”

  With gratitude,

  Mrs. Kugelman

  This classroom project was brought to life by An Anonymous Funder and 6 other donors.

• Learning Compassion for Others Through Reading and Writing Poetry

  Funded May 10, 2017

  Thank you so much for donating to our project. My third graders and I love the books that we received. The students especially loved a fantastic story about a man who grew up stuttering, which helped inspire him to help as an adult to protect jaguars from poachers. We also loved the books which had haiku that the students could connect with. They figured out the pattern of haiku by clapping out the syllables.

  We have been studying the impact of the hurricanes, and my students made a beautiful watercolor abstract painting. On top of the painting the students wrote their Hurricane Harvey haiku. It was very poignant, and a great way to introduce poetry to my students. The Compassion grant was an amazing gift - doubling the donations made to this project. We appreciate your support and love! Come visit and see our wonderful students.”

  With gratitude,

  Mrs. Kugelman

  This classroom project was brought to life by An Anonymous Funder and 4 other donors.

• LEGO WeDo Robotics Programming for Third Graders!

  Funded Sep 12, 2017

  Our robotics day yesterday was fantastic because we have the new iPad so every team has one to program with. Your generosity in matching donations means so much to our third graders. It enabled us to get a book explaining how the LEGO WeDo programming works, get some replacement parts, and get the new iPad.

  Having enough technology in the class so that everyone can program at the same time is fantastic! Before, there was a team that was waiting to try their programs. I set up a bridge in the classroom using some crates, and I told each team to program their Milo robot to go forward, stop under the bridge, play some lights, and make a sound, and then return back to home place. My students were so excited doing this! They kept calling me over to watch their Milo go through the programming they designed. Thank you so very, very much!”

  With gratitude,

  Mrs. Kugelman

  This classroom project was brought to life by An Anonymous Funder and 13 other donors.