Well, it has been a while since I posted. I wrote a post in December, but it was not posted. I’ll blame the internet. It keeps going out at home. Soon we will upgrade to ATT Uverse and have top speed. That will be sweet.

So, December 2015 I received a grant from the Washington ES PTA. I was excited to have my Kenan project receive funds. The main focus was to get some children books about building and drawing buildings. I also requested some ZOOBS for team building challenges. I also purchased paper rollercoasters. Boy, are they fun! What I’ve noticed when the kids are engaged in an engineering collaborative task they all look the same. What I mean by that is that you cannot tell the ELL kids from the AG kids from the struggling readers. They all work together toward their goal and it works! It’s a beautiful thing.

I’ve also found a collaboration partner. Chris is the Tech Person and we are two peas in a pod! We work well together. We both believe that learning is noisy and messy. LOVE HER! She shares her collaborative space with me for my class and my elective.

So, back to the paper rollercoasters. Chris (the tech person) and her friend Nathan Stevens from NCSU organized a time for him to come and share the paper rollercoaster with my class. What makes this great is that Nathan is a BIG thinker and has no limits or preconceived ideas of what the learning should be or what it should look like. I admit, I was a bit concerned to let the kids “go” and build a rollercoaster. But the kids really took the learning to a new level. Their collaboration was amazing! There were two groups and it was organized by gender. At first, I thought the girls would struggle more with the building. But their cooperation was strong. The boys were quick to build, but not collaboratively. VERY Interesting. The best part was that the majority of the kids were engaged and thinking. THINKING AND TRYING. Iterative design, try, improve, test, try, improve, test…

Rhonda and I met in January to figure out our next steps for the cross town collaboration. We met at our usual place, Carolina Cafe, in Cameron Village. We didn’t laugh as much as we usually do. There were too many changes in our lives and we needed to catch up. But, we did come up with a few constraints for the next round of the 3 Pigs move to the Beach. We are tying it to Area and Perimeter in math. And we are entering a new region of NC, the Coastal Plain.

We are hopping to get the houses built because Rhonda and I are presenting at NC Ties in early March.

I still hold my internship dear to me and my teaching. My internship is atypical because of many reasons. However, I brought to my internship a willingness to learn and try anything. I wanted to be helpful and supportive. I dove in and worked with the sales force. I met with the plant manager and the plant workers to learn about the manufacturing process for the roofing slates. I bring all these different experiences to the classroom. I also share my experiences with my team. Even though we have different styles and teaching strengths, I want to be there when my team wants to be a bit more innovative and let go some of the control in the classroom.

Oh, another JOY was that Lisa came to see my kids in action in December. It didn’t go as planned, it never does. But she saw the amazing third graders and their collaboration on a 3 Pigs go to the Mountains play. The kids wrote a script and they are working (still) to film using the green screen. Then, we will voice over and have a short story. LOVE IT! The ELA integration was Chris’ idea… That’s why I love collaborating with anyone! The project needed an ELA tie-in and the puppet/green screen was the perfect match!

I will add more in a few weeks. My project is coming together, slowly. I finally realized that I will not have a “lesson by lesson” product. It is more of a framework for integrating the 4Cs (a big WCPSS push) for student ownership of their learning.