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!
0 Comments
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.
To give high school juniors a chance to start thinking about life after high school, they have the opportunity to get a firsthand experience of college life by visiting three college campuses in one whirlwind of a day! Although it’s required of all juniors to do, this campus visit day was started four years ago by Kristen Bauer, high school counselor, and Allyson Kitch, high school business/CAPS instructor, to give those kids who may have never been on a college campus or may not have even thought college was something for them the chance to literally see college life for themselves. There are three different opportunities for visits, with each day featuring a community college, a private college, and one of our big three state universities. This year’s visits include a day at Kirkwood College, Coe College, and the University of Iowa. Another visit goes further south, visiting Des Moines Area Community College (DMACC), Drake University, and Iowa State University. There’s also a day that’s closer to home, covering Hawkeye Community College, Wartburg College, and the University of Northern Iowa. As an added bonus, the kids get to eat for free in a dining hall on the state university campuses! The students experience a short walking tour of campus, get inside a dorm room, typically get some kinds of “swag” from the campus, and have a chance to hear from and ask questions of an admissions person at each stop. This question-and-answer session provides information on admissions requirements, tuition costs, housing options, class size, work opportunities, and much more! These juniors' futures are so bright...they have to wear shades!
(Thank you to Kirkwood Community College for the sunglasses.) Our “small pieces, big picture” relationship theme didn’t end on August 22nd! A large, 204-piece puzzle (see below) was designed showcasing various aspects of our school, from the beautiful buildings to the new science labs, from the performing arts to athletics, featuring our wonderful track and field. A piece of the puzzle with a tag reminding “It’s always the small pieces that make the big picture!”, was hand delivered to each member or group, the “pieces”, of our Jesup Community School staff picture - with over 130 pieces being distributed! Our Jesup J-hawk BIG PICTURE wouldn’t be complete without each of these members, or SMALL PIECES, of our staff!
,Katie Martin is having fun teaching writer's workshop in kindergarten! Writing is something that she really wanted to bring out more this year with her students and they are loving every minute of it. At the start of every lesson Mrs. Martin does a think aloud lesson that includes brainstorming ideas that she (pretending to be a student) knows about. So once an idea has been chosen, she talks aloud to her students and demonstrates drawing her story on her journal pages (like the kids') and labels pictures with words and even beginning letter sounds to show kids that it's okay to not know the spelling right away. In the next step, each student comes to the front to grab his or her writing journal and shares with Mrs. Martin what they are going to write about and goes directly to his or her own seat. Once at their seats, students start putting their story ideas to paper through drawing and labeling. This is where the stamina comes in. Gradually, Mrs. Martin has increased their writing time from 6 minutes to 10 minutes today. She expects students to draw, write, and add color during the entire time until the bell rings. When the bell rings and they are finished, they will get a chance to share the story with Mrs. Martin. If they are not done, they get to keep going until completed. The final part of the writing process is to meet with Mrs. Martin to share their story. If needed, she will add labeling to pictures as students tell her what is happening and will write the story as it is dictated from the students. This is a big deal! At this very moment in sharing Mrs. Martin gets to see first hand what the student has been able to do independently. Building stamina in writing is very important and is truly a building block for future writing. This semester I am teaching an astronomy class and your child is in the class. It is one of my absolute favorite topics to teach, mostly because students usually are very interested in it. By its very nature…studying the universe and its origin…it’s the type of class that generates many thoughtful questions and discussions.
On the very first day of class this fall when I was giving the students an overview, a student raised his hand with a question, and it went something like this: “Aren’t you Catholic? But you teach science. How can you do that…do both?” I explained that it worked for me…that I didn’t necessarily see the two conflicting with each other, but in this class they would be learning how science explains things. It’s not the first time the question has been posed to me...in fact, he was the third to ask about it in the last year or so. Since students are curious about how the seemingly opposite viewpoints can complement each other, I thought I would talk to someone who also has a background in both science and faith …to a greater degree than me! Father Jeff Dole is the priest at St. Athanasius Parish here in Jesup. He is also a graduate of Iowa State University with a degree in engineering and did some work in that capacity before becoming ordained. He shared the idea that neither faith nor science exclude the other. Each can be responsible for different aspects of our lives. To be honest, I am thrilled that my students are even questioning this…that they are thinking on these levels…and that someone with Father’s background was there to lead that discussion. |
AuthorsJesup Connector Teachers Archives
December 2019
|