Hitting the Ground Sprinting

I have been very busy working for the Ka Pilina Project.   I have been spending most of my work days trying to recruit teachers and students for my project.  Recruiting students has been the highlight for most of my days since DOE schools started.  To give students a better understanding of what my project is about and what students could possibly do as a participate of my project I have been running a short activity with them.  I have been running the tower building activity with them like we did in summer with the STEMS2 program but instead of marshmallows and spaghetti we used tape and straws.  It is so interesting to see students structures.  Some built structures that had strong bases some didn’t. Some built structures like triangles, rectangles, polygons, and some incorporated many shapes.  Some stood some didn’t.  But more importantly everyone had fun.  After they were done building their towers I related the activity to math.  I asked them to think about tall building they know of in the real world.  I got answers like pyramids and the Eiffel tower.  So I asked do they know what the strongest shape is.  Most, if not all, of them didn’t know it was a triangle.  

I told students a group ran this tower building activity with K-professionals (kindergarteners to Professionals)and asked them, "Guessed who did the best?"  Some knew it was kindergarteners!  But they didn’t know why it was kindergarteners.  I told them “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”-Walt Disney.  And this is why kindergartners do so well.  They don’t spend a lot of time talking about what they should try to do or plan, they just do.  They try anything to accomplish their goal of building the tallest tower.  Then I said just like when you are doing math. You cant ever solve a math problem by just talking about it or complaining that you don’t know what to do.  Just try to solve it.  Try anything. You can never solve it if you just sit there.  I also pointed out that I liked how every tower was unique no tower was the same.  I pointed out that in math there isn’t always just one way to solve a problem.  There are usually different ways you can solve the problem.  I mentioned that in the directions I never stated how to build the tower just that they had to build the tallest one.  And everyone went about building their tower differently.  Some used triangles some used squares, some used all kinds of shapes, some just put bends here and there and the tower stood with no real definite shape. 

All in all the activity was fun and a push towards a positive attitude in math.  The atmosphere of the class changed from being quietly dead and a collection of individuals to a lot of good discussions and a team.

The other part of my job required me to help put on a professional development and two mentor trainings.  During the professional development we covered the topics of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and differentiated learning.  We also had teachers try out a program called Glogster.  Glogster is a graphic blog that they can use to make presentations.  In my personal opinion it is like making a poster board on the computer.  It is quite fun since you can pull anything off the internet and insert it into your glogster. 

For the mentor training we covered their roles as a mentor.  One of their biggest roles is to be a positive role model for students.  We also covered FERPA and the do's and dont's as a mentor.  Instructing them what to do in certain situations, what to report, and what is should be kept confidential.   

It has been a very busy few weeks, but I am hopefully that all the hard work will pay off in the end and that we will help many students now and in the future.