Monthly Archives: July 2014

One-Way Flight

As I type this, I sit at my desk in the North Carolina Science Festival/Morehead Production Team office above Sugarland and Carolina Coffee Shop on Franklin Street. My water bottle drips a few beads of sweat while I pull my denim shirt tighter around me to ward off impending goosebumps. I think I might miss being perpetually chilly…

Today is my last day in the office with the team. I’m heading to Ohio for a few days with family, and when I return it’ll be time for me to start whipping my elementary school classroom into shape before the workdays start (does anyone else find it completely absurd that on workdays we never have actual chunks of time to get our classrooms ready? Or is that just me?). Truly, this summer has flown by.

It feels not so long ago that we were all at NCCAT meeting one another for the first time, making connections with our spirit dogs, and adventuring down the Nantahala (HOW GREAT WAS THAT?!).

As I sit here, I find the time to type this because my lessons are completed. My supplemental materials are finished. All that’s left for me to do is wait — I want to review the curriculum with the other third grade teachers at my school, and my mentors need to review the curriculum as well. I’ve started taking the teacher lesson plans I’ve written and translating them into layman’s terms for the Festival’s public library program so we can put together some one-page activity guides.

I’ve also been sketching planes and rockets, but that’s been happening since all this started in the middle of June.

This has been an experience that was unexpected yet wonderful. I’ve learned a lot, and not only in regards to flight. I’ve learned about professionalism, how to work with a wide array of people, and increasing community engagement by networking. I knew this internship would look different than that of my peers, and it was hard for me hearing about all the amazing, hands-on activities so many other people were doing throughout the summer while I sat on a computer most of the day. I had to continue to tell myself to be patient, and that my hands-on moments would come, they’d just come later.

Now that our summer chapter is coming to an end, I’m feeling very hopeful, excited, and happy. I feel very good about my program activities, and I can’t wait to see them translated into activity guides for librarians, informal educators, and other teachers to use. I think the lessons are solid and the community outreach piece that we’re still working on will be just as strong. I’m excited to continue my connections with people at places like the Carolinas Aviation Museum, North Carolina Library Services, and the Wright Brothers Memorial. I’m beyond excited to start communication with companies like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin (insert nerd FREAK OUT here).

Ultimately, I just cannot wait to meet the sweet babies that get to be my passengers on this curriculum pilot with me!

[Puns!]

This whole summer has given me a fresh perspective on what it means to really engage my students. I like to think I’m fairly aware of what hooks my kiddos, and I’m constantly trying to do all that I can to make their learning experiences enjoyable ones. I’ve seen firsthand the effectiveness of getting kids to create and do, not just “sit and get” their information, and between my previous classroom experiences and this summer’s KFP experience, I’m more cognizant of how imperative it is to grab student attention with science.

Even though today is my last day in the office with NCSF and Morehead staff, they know they’ll have to do more than take away my keys to rid me of this office. 🙂

Here’s to a beautiful summer filled with experiential learning, and an even more beautiful start to a new school year!

Control Panel

There have been a few a-ha moments for me this summer. My eyes have been opened to things that have been lighting up on my control panel for a while that have needed tending to, and now I know that I must do something about those flashing little lights.

  1. Professional Development: The level of PD that I’ve experienced with this program has been out of this world. I’ve been engaged, I’ve been challenged, and I’ve been left with a mind that’s just reeling with questions and ideas. I’ve never left a PD at my school feeling this way, so this is quite refreshing. My time with Morehead Planetarium and the NCSF has also opened my eyes to what it means to be a true professional. It’s been an honor to be called the “in-house teaching expert” while I’ve been there, and it feels so good to be seen as competent, trustworthy, and knowledgeable about my craft. I keep a personal blog and word exploded this post about PD — feel free to check that out if you’re so inclined.
    Action steps: Take my PD experiences with Kenan Fellows and do my best to translate them into my school environment. Continue to stay positive and implement all I can while on the school’s leadership team this year.
  2. Citizen Science: THIS is how to engage kids, y’all. This right here. I had never heard of citizen science before this summer, and I am HOOKED (if you think I’m joking, as any of my non-teaching friends what I’ve been talking about for the last few weeks). The ways we’ve had the chance to engage in citizen science projects with Dr. Holly from NCCAT or with Prairie Ridge Ecostation, all I can think about is my kids and how much they’d love what I’m doing. I’ve always believed science, and education in general, should be very hands-on and experiential, and this concept of citizen science has totally renewed my teaching spirit in this thinking! I literally cannot wait to take this idea back to my school and my kiddos in a few weeks — those eight-year-olds are going to love it!
    Action steps: Integrate citizen science into my every day classroom curriculum. Already thinking of ways I can get involved through our science units this year!

There’s been another overarching a-ha moment for me as well. I really love what I do. I’ve known this and have felt completely confident in my decision to be a teacher (or did teaching choose me? Of course there’s a blog post about that, too). This overarching a-ha comes in the form of reinforcing my passion for this profession. I take this job so seriously, and I am absolutely humbled to call myself a teacher to these precious children in Chapel Hill-Carrboro. I am also humbled at the fact that I have the opportunity to work with all of you Kenan Fellows. I can’t help but think “A-ha! This is exactly where I need to be!” every time we get together. Thank you for that, fellow friends!

Looking forward to experiencing many more a-ha moments as this journey continues.

Elevators Enhancing Lift

The elevators of an aircraft are located on the horizontal stabilizers and work to provide lift for the aircraft. Lift’s force has to be stronger than that of the weight of the aircraft in order for it to fly, and I think I’m finally getting my lift on, y’all.

Throughout the summer, thinking about curriculum hasn’t been the easiest. At the Science Festival, we probably went through at least two or three ideas of what we thought this project would look like until we came up with our definitive vision just a week or so ago. This was hard for me because I like to think writing curriculum is something I’m pretty good at, but when you’re writing and scrapping repeatedly, you don’t exactly feel the most effective.

After meeting with librarians and a children’s literature expert, and having phone conferences with the youth services state librarian coordinator and the Carolinas Aviation Museum, a clear, attainable vision has been drawn out before me, and I like the way that feels.  Getting input from these stakeholders has been imperative, because they’re the people for whom I’m doing this. I am desperately searching out feedback for this program from librarians, because I want what I write to be beneficial to them and successful for the children they reach. I want libraries to use this program and see growth in their attendance and individual programs as well.

So, maybe (hopefully) you’re wondering what kind of curriculum it is that I’m finally writing.

Initially, our plan was the four forces of flight — thinking along the lines of physics and how it would be best to disseminate that information to young children. We tested paper airplane models, did a lot of Googling research, and found that maybe we need to take a different approach to this considering the fact that this concept seemed a bit overdone. Granted, just because something is overdone doesn’t mean it’s (a) done well or (b) impossible to do again, but at the Science Festival we’re always looking for ways to be innovative.

A few weeks later and our track is completely different.

Instead of honing in on the physics, we’re extending our runway and encompassing ALL the ways science is tied to flight. We’re looking at the biology (why wings are shaped after birds’ wings, how to survive in space), chemistry (acid-base bottle rockets, how the chemical reactions of rocket fuel work), engineering (prototyping paper planes, learning how the Wright Brothers crafter their successful powered glider), meteorology (kite-building/testing, weather observations linked to rocket launches), and physics (demos with Bernoulli’s principle, four forces of flight basics).

So yeah, we’re covering all the bases. It’s been especially fun for me to think of the bilingual/biliteracy piece, and when coming up with vocabulary and resources I’m doing my best to find things in both English and Spanish. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that others will find this as useful as I do.

I really, truly, massively love this approach to teaching kids about flight. I think it’s crucial to let kids know how multi-faceted and integrated our lives are — flight isn’t just about engineering a plane to fly, but it’s also about things like material making and understanding how to read maps in an air traffic control tower. This is a great plug for integration across subjects, which is big at my school where we do project-based learning.

In addition to the above science-themed activities, I’m also working on a book list, which I mentioned in a previous post. The list is growing and includes informational and fiction books for K-5 students. There’s a little bit of everything on the list, from graphic novels to picture books to biographies to historical fiction. As a reading teacher, this has been so fun to put together and hear from others about what they’d like to see on a list like this. I’ve been working on some fun visual storytelling and writing activities for the program, too.

In my last post, I mentioned how I wasn’t sure how I would make this fit into my classroom, considering this program I’m writing is specifically for libraries, and librarians were adamant about not receiving anything remotely close to a lesson plan for the program. I was a little concerned because I had already spelled out this great culminating task (well, I think it’s great and I have really high hopes for the implementation of the project this fall!) and was hoping my experience with the NCSF would help me knock out some fun, engaging lessons to lead up to that task. Well, fortunately after talking to one of my mentors, we were able to come up with some more space-themed activities for the library program activity menu, and now I’ll be able to implement those in my class this fall!

Everything is a rough draft and a work in progress, but the way the curriculum writing path is now leading feels good. I have clarity, I know what needs to be done, and I’m confident that I’ll be able to knock out some solid lessons for this program that’ll be usable in both a classroom and a library.

Skies are clear and there’s nowhere to go but up.

Connecting Flights

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I’ve spent a decent amount of time thinking about how to connect my current summer work with my classroom come August, and to be honest it’s a little tricky.

The program I am working on with the Science Festival has me developing curriculum for libraries across the state. This is all well and good, but the largest part of how I’m spending my time is working on something that I won’t necessarily be directly implementing in my classroom.

A few weeks ago, we met with some librarians from Durham County Libraries (DURHAM REPRESENT!), and we had a very productive, informative meeting. Something that struck me as surprising was how adamant the librarians were that they were NOT teachers, and they do NOT want to see lesson plans of any kind in a program, because libraries are NOT school.

Needless to say, this completely changed my perspective on my project at hand.

I had worked on developing some lessons to teach students about the four basic principles of flight — lift, weight, thrust, and drag. Initially, this was the plan, but I’ve come to find out that plans change very quickly. Upon hearing this, a new direction had to be set with our programming. I still have all the lessons I wrote initially, and I will probably use them in some capacity in my class.

The most relevant thing I think about this project is a vetted book list I’m creating with books for all grade levels, K-5, about flight. I’m working with a children’s literature specialist from UNC on vetting the list, and I’m getting input from other librarians and teachers in my network. I do a lot of read alouds in my reading class, and reading about flight will definitely help kids make explicit connections for their project time.

When I started this project, I was under the impression we’d be looking at not only plane flight, but space flight as well. Right before school was out for the summer, I came up with an incredibly integrated culminating task for my unit on solar system, physics, and economy, and I was hoping that would play nicely into the work I’d do at the Science Festival. Needless to say, the jury is still kind of out on that one.

I’m really enjoying my time with the NC Science Festival, and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to create a program for libraries across the state to use to further science education, specifically about flight. I’m also curious to get a clearer picture of how I can use what I’m doing now to shape what I do in my classroom with my third graders.

Houston, We Have a Problem

Technology challenges blog post, here I am.

To be honest, I’m not completely sure what I’m supposed to write about here specifically, because I feel like “technology challenges” is kind of a broad term, so I’m just gonna wing it (the flight puns are inescapable, y’all).

When we were at NCCAT, there was this rush of information crashing over me — all these new technology tools, all these great ways to apply them in my classroom. Technology is something really important to me as a teacher in my classroom, and it was actually part of my PDP last year. I love collaborating with our school’s Technology Specialist (he’s actually the BEST – here’s a shout out to Hal even though he’ll never see it!), and I see high levels of student engagement when we use technology in our classroom.

My first year teaching, I used a class Twitter account and blog regularly. It was really easy for me to tell a kid during our two hour reading block to go update the blog with what we’re doing today, and it was super easy at the end of the day to have a couple kids hop on a desktop where the Twitter account was already logged in so they can type a little blurb of what they loved learning that day.

I wanted to do this again in my classroom this past year, and unfortunately it didn’t happen. My classroom doesn’t have any desktop computers in it, so my convenient “Hey [insert kid’s name here], go blog/tweet!” didn’t really apply anymore. Despite this, our grade level DOES have a laptop cart available for all the teachers to share on a daily basis. My new plan is maybe to have a laptop station set up every day with at least one laptop where I can have kids take turns using the laptops for blogging and tweeting. I love Twitter, but I also really love Twiducate, which I heard about at NCCAT. I like that it’s a safe medium for us to use  (not that Twitter is unsafe, but sometimes things can pop up that you might not want the little babies to see).

Another problem I think I have with technology is that I want to try ALL OF IT AT THE SAME TIME. I get so excited about trying all these technology tools, but at times I get caught amidst other things that require immediate attention, like making copies and getting back to school packets together and making sure all my caddies have coloring supplies in them for Meet the Teacher Night. Then, when reality comes up, I don’t always follow through with my initial sparks of technological use. I need to pick a few things, do them well, follow through, and then assess at the end of the year. It’s okay to not try it all at once, regardless of how zealous I am.

I also have all these grand ideas for using technology more during my literacy instruction. In case you aren’t sure, I teach third grade reading and project blocks in English at my bilingual school. I have very little issue integrating technology in my project blocks, but I want to use it even more during reading workshop (the blogging/tweeting will help with this to an extent, I think). I want my kids recording their voices on iPads more consistently, I want them engaging with informational texts online, and I want them to do some mini-projects online as well. To me, this is part of being a 21st Century learner — not just being able to use a computer, but being independent enough to further knowledge of concepts. I know this is attainable, and I also know that this will take more planning on my part to make sure things are set up and ready with tight rotations every day, but I know it’s worth it. It’s worth kids loving reading, it’s worth kids wanting to come to school every day, and it’s worth watching my kids be successful in their academic endeavors.

With this past school year under my belt, I realize how much faster I want to integrate technology in my classroom. I taught my third graders how to use Google Drive this year, and they were incredibly independent with it by the end. A fourth grade teacher at my school already came up to me before the year was over to thank me for teaching my kids how to use that online program, as it becomes exceedingly important as the kids get higher up in grade levels. I want to prep my kids earlier, so that I can let them be even more self-reliant throughout the year (because honestly, in case you couldn’t tell by now, that’s my main goal for these third graders — for them to become independent, lifelong learners who are passionate about growing knowledge in their brains).

Technology can be a challenge for many teachers to use, but it can also be a very powerful medium to reach every child in your classroom. Which will it be for you this year?