Taking Each Available Chance to Heal--This is what each staff member got a chance to do on our November 11th day of PD. The elementary team were able to get a little yoga in, middle school staff played "Sock,sock, wrench", and high school staff did a mini escape room challenge. Along with these specific activities geared for grade level buildings, all staff participated in a "Stand Up" activity that encouraged sharing in small groups. There were even awesome snacks provided! Overall, it was a great way for staff to continue taking care of themselves and each other.
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After spending the morning of professional development learning more about pre-assessments, bell ringers and exit tickets, these high school teachers got a chance to get to know each other a little better with some lunch at Urban Pie in Cedar Falls and then off to Cedar Valley Escape for a little team building. Can you tell which team was successful? Lots of fun and laughter (and maybe a little competition). What a great way to get to know each other a little better!
During a unit on cooking with vegetables, Becca Kenealy’s high school Foods class was challenged to find a recipe using cauliflower as a main ingredient. The students rose to the challenge, making such things as cauliflower pizza crust, buffalo cauliflower “wings”, and of course, cauliflower ice cream!
Several Jesup teachers took the opportunity to lead break-out sessions for staff on November 11th, a full day of professional development. Sessions(presenters) offered included: Google Classroom(Rottinghaus/Nolting), Writers' Workshop(Martin/SmithThoreson), Literacy Mini Lessons(Trueg), Math Number Talks(Harrold), Backwards Design(Meier), IEP Accommodations/Modifications(Yeoman/Rea/Seeman), Small Group Reading K-2(Conrad/Parmely), Behavior Management Strategies(OZ), DOK(Wall), Growth Mindset(Sauer/Miller), What is Glogster and MackinVIA(Tomkins), TEACH-social emotional learning(Emerson/Kitch).
What a great day of learning, sharing, and collaboration! Thank you so much, Jesup Staff, for leading and participating! That's just what the middle school Kindness Club is striving to do this year! This group of 5th through 8th graders meets twice a week during J-hawk time to do activities that spread kindness. The picture above shows their latest project. Located in the lobby next to the South Gym, it's a great photo op for anyone to "be the 'i' in kind"! Thanks for spreading kindness, Kindness Club!In our standards-driven, Middle school classrooms teachers are working hard connecting students to Next Generation Science Standards recently adopted by many schools across the state. A great example is Mr. Feldt’s 5th-grade classroom. The past few weeks, students have worked on gaining an understanding of one of the Next Gen Standards, 5-ESS1-2: Represent data in a graphical display to reveal patterns of daily changes in length and direction of shadows, day and night, and the seasonal appearance of some stars in the night sky. Mr. Feldt is bringing this standard to life by creating engaging and active lessons that allow students to connect with new learning on how the Earth and Sun interact to create shadows. For an active portion of the unit, Mr. Feldt took students to the parking lot throughout the day to create shadow measurements. This allowed them to see that shadow lengths and positions change hour by hour. Bringing the learning back to the classroom students engage in cross-curricular content. In this case, he has students connecting skills from both Science and Math. Students had collected shadow length data. With this data, they learned how a graph can help to discover patterns, interpret trends, or understand their data in a meaningful way. The connections between science and other academic areas do not stop there! Students had opportunities to research, learn about units of measure, make predictions, and tie real-world problems to environmental or natural factors. Purposefully designed units like these allow students to find success in many more academic domains than just science. Students can leverage the skills learned in this unit as they enter their next math class, or need to research items for an upcoming literacy project. Miss Jurgersen's 4th grade class recently enjoyed the classic read-aloud Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume. To show their understanding of the book and to encourage others to read it, too, the students were given the task of creating a movie poster based on the book. The only guidelines were to include the title, author, setting, character, and a picture of or words describing his or her favorite scene. What creativity, Miss J's 4th graders!
You bet! Third grade students learned to write a “how-to” in a very authentic way...by chewing gum! Well, there was a bit more to it than that. This unit started with the teachers modeling the how-to writing process in another authentic way - by going through the steps in tying a shoe or making a sandwich, something for which all the kids could relate. The students then began their own writing process by brainstorming. This included drawing pictures of the steps and adding words to describe the pictures. The kids then actually chewed the gum to help them through the editing and revising steps! Check out the final, published pieces below.
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AuthorsJesup Connector Teachers Archives
December 2019
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