Past projects 5
Epic Texts for Legendary Kids!!
Funded Oct 21, 2021Our Lightning Thief novel study was an amazing success! It ignited a love of reading among many students in my classroom, and allowed me to teach so many essential skills in an engaging way. Students may learn to read more mechanically with phonics, but that alone doesn't make them fluent readers. They build vocabulary and contextual understanding more organically from the texts they read. When students are deeply engaged with what they are reading, they gain more from it.
What sort of lessons can you really teach with a work of fiction? We used this text to learn about character traits and hidden motivations. We learned to make inferences, and how to support our points with evidence. We learned about setting, and how to use adjectives effectively in descriptions. We learned the mechanics of effective grammar and punctuation in our many writing pieces based on our novel studies. And what I am proudest of is the work my students did with theme. We crushed theme this year! In previous years, students have struggled to really understand what theme is. I would get a lot of story references but no life lessons applicable to their own lives. This year I got some of the best student-generated theme ideas ever. They really connected emotionally to some of the characters' problems, and internalized some interesting advice from the story! One theme suggestion was "Don't go off into dangerous places with people who are acting sus !" (kids' way of saying suspicious). I laughed, but agreed after hearing the group's evidence that this certainly was a lesson we could learn from the main character's poor choices in this story.
These books generated so much excitement that my students asked to read more of the series. I bought several copies of the second book for the class library. There was a waiting list! So I taught students how to borrow ebooks from the real library so they wouldn't need to wait. Then several parents bought the series for their kids! We were on fire! We signed up and joined a video call/ Zoom webinar with the author. We compared the novel to the movie version. We even made Camp Half Blood t-shirts when we were learning about silhouettes in art. At our party, I bought some copies of the second series and gave them away in a raffle. My principal and other teachers frequently mentioned the buzz around this because everyone knew. So never doubt that your donations made a difference. Instilling a love of reading in kids this age is priceless. I am so grateful to you for making our success in this endeavor possible. Thank you. Thank you.”
With gratitude,
Ms. Anderson
This classroom project was brought to life by Dollar General Literacy Foundation and 2 other donors.Help Us Share the Learning!
Funded Nov 2, 2019Thank you so much! Your donations for our cameras and microphones have helped the majority of classrooms at our school to reach out to people in the US and around the world and become inspired global collaborators! Additionally other teachers at school and in the community have connected with us to try Skyping out and see how useful it can be. Our classrooms have interviewed faraway experts and completed projects with grade level peers at neighboring schools. We have even gone on virtual field trips and made new connections with the people we've met. Why use Skype lessons? These interviews or collaborations really add interest to lessons and increase student engagement. An engaged student is ready to learn! Another advantage of Skype lessons is they often allow kids to get to the source of the information we want kids to learn in a way that is just not possible in person.
Let me share a handful of the projects my colleagues and I have been working on with the kids so far. Second grade students in Ms. Vaish's class reached out to scientists studying recycling in Portugal and became inspired! They became excited to code recycling sorting programs for our Dash robots and created an awareness-building campaign promoting recycling in our community. Fifth grade students of Ms. Vargaz spoke with a UCLA professor of neuroscience on the adolescent brain. They really learned the value of a growth mindset with this project! My 4th grade class took a virtual field trip to a California mission and learned more about several handicrafts practiced back then. We learned how to make candles, prepare wool, thread, and weave cloth. This is something I could have shown them a video about but it would not ever have been the same as the live interactions!
We have only begun to tap the potential of what we can do with our cameras and microphones. I look forward to seeing what else we can use them for. So thank you again for opening these doors to the world for our kids!”
With gratitude,
Ms. Anderson
This classroom project was brought to life by Verizon and 9 other donors.Unleash the Power of the Printed Word!
Funded Sep 12, 2019We are so grateful for the printer you have given us! A printer seems like such a small thing, and yet it has really made a big difference in my students' education. It has certainly made exercising their creativity faster and more efficient, but it has also made it possible for me to differentiate assignments for particular kids at different instructional levels more consistently.
Regarding the opportunity to be more creative, students no longer have to wait until I can print their writing at my house and bring it to them the next day. They can print it themselves and ask their classmates for feedback and revisions. This quick turnaround and the immediacy of having their own thoughts on paper right away has led to students asking to use Google Docs to complete other writing tasks. It excites me to see them becoming more independent!
For my own instructional program, an unexpected benefit of the printer has been the freedom from the textbook! I was limited to the printed instructional resources provided by the school or purchased by me but my kids often require something more. For example, the text may give one lesson on a standard when my kids need several lessons on that topic. Also I need various levels of difficulty for different kids within the same lessons. Prior to having the printer, we either all had to do the same cookie-cutter assignments or I had kids circling different problems and writing in changes in their workbooks or copying problems I made up from the board. Those students who need the most differentiations are often those that get confused by altering the book problems or make mistakes copying from the board. With this printer I can type up a quick alternative assignment on my laptop as I am working with the small group and give them work on the topic tailored to the instructional level they need.
The printer also served as a catalyst for another great change in my room! As students tried to work together around one device, a couple of my students got tired of the awkwardness and taught the others how to share documents. Now their entire group can work on the documents at once and get them printed out even more quickly! As the teacher, my colleagues and I use this all the time but I never thought to teach this year's students to do the same. So thank you, James, Chris and Reggie for moving us another step closer on our path to becoming global collaborators! And thanks again to you, Donors, for making all of our growth in this area possible!”
With gratitude,
Ms. Anderson
This classroom project was brought to life by An Anonymous Funder and 7 other donors.Using Art to Make Sense of History!
Funded Dec 17, 2016Thank you for making our trip to Mission San Juan Capistrano possible! The weather forecast for the day of the trip predicted heavy rain so I was quite worried about how that would impact us. Would we be unable to see the outdoor historical sites? The mission urged us to come anyway, and it turned out that my fears were unfounded. In fact, as the other schools canceled, we had the place to ourselves! The rain held off almost until we were headed home. We thoroughly enjoyed being able to linger in the various rooms and discuss what we were seeing without having to hurry on so another docent-led group could come in. Students took photos and made drawings of the things they saw for our murals later.
I felt my students learned a lot about daily life during this period in history based on the questions they asked about the furnishings in the rooms and the various tools and artifacts they saw. They got to try out replica musical instruments used by the Acjachemen people. They were surprised by the outdoor ovens and the beds used by the priests and soldiers. It was clear though that what they enjoyed most was making the adobe bricks. This class was a winner. Many of the students proudly showed me their bricks; a few thought we should return home, make a lot of them and build something out of them! Umm. Maybe not? We all had a lot of fun with this activity anyway. Even the parent chaperones made some of their own.
When we got back, we got to work on our murals. It was time to see what they retained of what they had experienced. The murals took quite a lot of time. As I write this letter they are still not truly completed. Each kid wanted to make a picture that we would include, but finally we agreed that each picture used must show something that the whole class would consider important or educational. The first mural showed the lives of the Native Americans before the Spanish colonized California. We definitely encountered some technical difficulties painting this one, but we learned from it valuable lessons about mixing colors and if different paint media could be successfully combined. (I don't recommend deciding to mix paint types using trial and error! Acrylic paints don't play well with others as my kids discovered.) We also learned to laugh at our mistakes and just paint over them. This slowly growing mural also definitively taught my students the word hunter-gatherer so I consider the effort that went into it worth every minute of class time. The second mural shows how lives changed for the Native Americans after the Spanish established the missions here. This one is actually still in progress. We planned our masterpiece, but you can see us still assembling it in the last posted photo.
Make no mistake that the impact of these activities for my students is still unfolding. A student the other day explained to me that this history we were studying was like Minecraft. When you start the game you are a hunter-gatherer, and then you move on to build a base and have an agricultural economy. "What type (of economy) is next?" he wondered. "You know how you trade with the villagers? Is that a type of economy?"
"Yes," I said. "Why don't we look that up?"
I was so proud. Thank you again for your support for my students.”
With gratitude,
Ms. Anderson
This classroom project was brought to life by an anonymous donor and 10 other donors.Going for the Gold! Life During the California Gold Rush
Funded Mar 22, 2012Our learning project was a resounding success thanks to the support all of you graciously provided! I have taught the California Gold Rush for years, but I can say that this year the students really enjoyed the subject matter and learned more than ever before.
What made the difference? The kid-friendly approach of the fun history books was so accessible that students asked to borrow them to take home to read. I was thrilled, of course. Never before have they asked me to include social studies research materials as part of the lending library. The most enthusiastically received books were the You Choose/Interactive History Adventure gold rush novels. Students all read it more than once. Some as many as 11 times! These great little books taught them more about the various routes to the gold rush and the dangers and challenges travelers of the time faced than any of our text books. The copies of By The Great Horn Spoon were also really enjoyed; this novel helped one of my weaker readers become more motivated and taught the class a lot about the precarious nature of life in a mining camp.
Also including the hands-on work with the photographs and the charcoal added several dimensions to the learning. We learned how to use photographs from the time period as primary sources. Studying these pictures allowed even my second language learners to get a good sense of key events. The art portion of the project required students to learn how to take portraits, use photo booth software to put themselves in a gold rush scene or use effects to make their pictures look old fashioned, and then we learned to reproduce these scenes in charcoal. While this was a challenge, the students rose to the occasion and produced some impressive scenes. Many of them acquired some important art skills like a deeper understanding of value, contrast and proportion.
At the conclusion of our unit, the students were eager to prove how much they learned. They presented their work in a gallery fashion and explained what they learned to parents and our principal. When we went on a field trip, the students were eager to teach the docents what they knew! I couldn'ÂÂt have been prouder of them! You can be sure I will teach this unit next year using these materials. It was more than I could have hoped for. Thank you all so much!”
With gratitude,
Ms. Anderson