On January 15, approximately 45 NDMS students, family members, and staff gathered to kick-off our second Reading Knightly family reading program. This year's book selection is No Summit Out of Sight by Jordan Romero (last year we used Fish in a Tree). This is a true story written by Jordan about his experiences as the youngest person to climb all 7 Summits! Reading Knightly is an invitation for families to read a great book together with no tests, questions, reading logs, or deadlines. This year I was able to get the books highly discounted from Scholastic, so families paid for the book and their dinner. We offered financial assistance as needed. Families gathered for dinner and then floated through Exploration Stations in the media center. We had pictures, articles, maps, and videos about the 7 Summits, altitude sickness, how mountains form, mountain wildlife, mountain climbing, dangers & rescues, and Jordan Romero. We also had two guests. Wendy Beck from the North Davidson Public Library promoted the public library resources to families. Scott Arrington from Gnarwall Bouldering Gym in Pfafftown brought pictures and equipment from his personal rock climbing adventures. In February the Reading Knightly students will take an exclusive field trip to the Gnarwall Bouldering Gym. Later in the semester we will also take a virtual field trip to Mount Everest using our hopefully-soon-to-arrive Google Expedition Kits. Our final event will be in April, where we will gather again to celebrate reading and hopefully hear a guest speaker inspire students to reach their goals (one of the main lessons in No Summit Out of Sight). The Animoto video shows some highlights from our kick-off! https://animoto.com/play/O6fldZfEd0P0ZVwVw24Y6w
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#154: HiToms baseball team partners with area elementary schools for reading incentive program1/24/2019 HiToms staff and TomKat, the mascot, visited area schools this week to launch their brand new "Reading around the Bases" program. All students are encouraged to read for prizes, including HiToms swag, coupons and tickets to a baseball game later this spring. HiToms president, Greg Suire, also announced an upcoming picture book with TomKat visiting local historical landmarks around Thomasville. TomKat and friends visited Fair Grove, Brier Creek and Pilot Elementary this week to surprise students and announce the reading incentive program. SLMC Lorie Steed and English teacher, Chad Killebrew, collaborated on a Roaring Twenties event Friday, Jan. 18 at Central Davidson High School. After his classes finished reading The Great Gatsby, Killebrew reached out to Steed for ideas to help make exam review more engaging. Lorie had learned about an idea using stations from a library colleague, Robin Rhodes, from Wilkes County. She incorporated Rhodes' ideas with similar lessons from her days as an English teacher. She and Mr. Killebrew modified the assignment to emphasize synthesis skills students will need for their N.C. Final Exam. Students rotated among 10 stations to research different aspects of the '20s (such as Prohibition, Art, Sports, etc.) It offered a fun way to end the semester while still helping students use skills they will need both on their final exam and in future research. Students interacted with the content through digital media, engaged in substantive and dialogic conversations, and practiced writing constructed responses in preparation for the upcoming exam. For example, after reading Walter Dean Myers' Harlem, students had to discuss how imagery helps develop tone in texts. Students were highly engaged and expressed approval of the hands-on activities. Digital Learning Coach Libby Ferrell collaborated with SLMC Shanna Leonard to launch the Digital Learning Challenge to Southmont Elementary. Thanks to Libby for sharing this blog post and Shanna for sharing the pictures. Yesterday Southmont teachers met to learn about the new digital learning challenges for 2019 on the school’s Digital Learning Challenge website. Last year Southmont rolled out the digital learning challenge website to encourage the use of digital tools. We created the website using Weebly to include all the necessary information teachers would need to learn and implement new digital tools. For this year, Shanna had the great idea to include some prizes for challenge completion including: a jeans coupon, an order out coupon, and raffle entries for a new iPad case. She also made sure we kicked off the challenges in a fun way by providing cake and snacks for teachers before the meeting. We explained that the digital learning challenge website operates as “flipped professional development”; it’s flexible and teachers can choose to learn about any of the tools featured that fit best into their curriculum and for their students. For each tool we include: a brief synopsis of what the tool is, an explanation of how the tool can be used, lesson ideas, and instructions on how to get started using the tool. Each challenge requires teachers to submit evidence or an artifact showing that they have utilized the tool. Once they submit their evidence, they earn a challenge badge and an hour of digital learning credit. Last year 100% of Southmont’s classroom teachers met the school’s goal of completing 3 digital learning challenges. Sixty percent of teachers surpassed this goal by completing more than three challenges and as a school, teachers earned almost 90 hours in digital learning credit since the program debuted. Schools have participated in similar app challenge programs to encourage staff and students to utilize technology tools for teaching and learning. Here are the things we’ve learned to make it run smoothly:
This program has been a great way for media coordinators, digital learning coaches, and teachers to collaborate and learn from each other. Several elementary schools have adopted this program with great success. My hope is that in the future we can begin to introduce this program (or something similar) in more of our secondary schools. It has been a blast! With the thought of Saturday school looming over us and a recent conversation on how to spark student interest in our high school media center program, Dr. Reeder suggested we use this opportunity to promote the media center in a big way. With that small spark, collaboration and many prayers, #CATcon19 was ignited! The schedule for #CATcon19 allowed students to choose four conference-style sessions to attend throughout the school day. Students were able to choose from a total of thirty-six sessions offered by the teachers and staff of SDHS and Sedley Abercrombie and Libby Ferrell from the county tech center. Sessions ranged from Learning to Fly Fish to 3-D Printing and many things in between. Students attended class sessions at regular times and had 45 minutes of instruction. The second half of each period was time for #CATcon19 sessions. At the end of each session students filled out exit tickets to enter them into drawings for door prizes throughout the day. The best thing about the exit tickets - the fact that they were thinking routines and were a way for students to reflect and teachers to see how easily they could be implemented! The thinking routines used for exit tickets were:
Saturday school was a huge success at SDHS and students and staff made the most of the day by making it engaging and fun! Photos from #CATcon19 Davidson County's only book store closed some years ago, and for many of our students the closest book store is many miles away in neighboring counties. For some, this is an experience that is just out of reach. The closest they get to perusing brand new books is the book fairs that come to our area elementary and middle schools. Last spring, some of our high school media coordinators were wondering why there aren't book fairs for high schools. After some research, we unfortunately learned that for the major book fair companies, high school book fairs just aren't profitable. So as a team, we reached out to Bookmarks, a non-profit bookstore and literary foundation in Winston-Salem, to brainstorm a new concept to bring the book fair experience to those in grades 9-12. Thankfully, Jamie Southern and Ashley Bryan of Bookmarks were very receptive to the idea and were eager to help. Well this fall, our idea came to fruition. Because this was a pilot program, we started small with 100 high-interest and award-winning young adult titles of various genres, as well as "bonus" literary themed gift items for sale. Students and staff were able to browse the merchandise and place orders for delivery after conclusion of the book fair. The inventory fit neatly in four boxes and was easily transported by car from school to school. The Bookmarks Book Fair traveled to our 7 traditional high schools beginning the middle of October at West Davidson and concluded in early December at Ledford High School. Participating schools had the option of earning 20% profit or passing the savings on to students. The Bookmarks Book Fair was well received by students and staff members alike. At the end of our "traveling book fair", Bookmarks generously donated all 100 titles to our high schools to share. Our high school media coordinators were overjoyed with their generosity. There was a learning curve and a few hiccups along the way, but our high school media coordinators are looking forward to future book fair opportunities. HS library media coordinators, Brene Duggins (Oak Grove), Mary Howell (South), Kenny Foster (West), Amy Daugherty (East), and Lorie Steed (Central), are excited the book fair has arrived at West Davidson High School.We are going to have our Free Little Library open for our students to use over the holidays. The students bring in books they have at home and have read, and leave them for someone else to read and enjoy. Then they choose books to take home to read themselves. Hopefully, this will help provide books for our students and encourage reading over the holidays. We will continue to offer books after the holidays, also.
To learn more about Little Free Libraries, click here: https://littlefreelibrary.org/. Could you ever imagine a five year old being able to successfully code a computer program? That’s what’s happening this week at Reeds Elementary as we celebrate Computer Science Education Week (#csedweek)!!
Every student at our school, from kindergarten to fifth grade, is participating in the “Hour of Code”. Millions of schools, world-wide, are also participating in this global movement to get kids actively involved in computer science. The organization responsible for organizing this inspiring event is Code.org., and they make planning so simple! Everything you need to plan your own school-wide event is located at: https://hourofcode.com/us/learn. Teachers are provided with step-by-step instructions, lesson ideas, and how-to videos, along with all the cool coding activities for students. Popular coding choices featured include: Minecraft, Star Wars, Disney’s Frozen, Angry Birds, and Plants vs. Zombies. Every student has LOVED learning to code and they don’t want the lesson to end! I’ve included the website on our “Reeds Favorite Links” page of our school’s website so they can go back later and try more coding on their own. I highly recommend trying this out with your own students. It’s a guaranteed “crowd pleaser”!! I know many media coordinators facilitate a daily or weekly news show at their schools, and have answered my many questions about it. Thank you for all of your advice as we started ours at NDMS! Here is how we decided to run our news program. It has been a lot of fun and a huge learning curve for me. I am constantly impressed by our students. Our School Improvement Team requested a student news show after several years of not having one. We didn't have the technology to easily do a daily live show, so we decided to have a weekly pre-recorded show. Students applied in the spring of last year. We had so many strong applicants that I decided to have two crews or 7 or 8 students each. They come every other week Monday-Thursday during our daily Intervention time. Because each crew comes every other week, each student does have time in his/her class if needed to work on interventions or enrichment activities. The students plan their segments, write scripts, conduct interviews, film, and help edit using iMovie. Each news crew has a Team Google Drive for their files. As the year has progressed, they have taken on more leadership and shown more creativity, collaboration, and problem-solving! Each show is approximately 5 minutes long and is shown in the classrooms on Fridays. I upload it into a shared Google Drive. The students announce upcoming events, interview staff and students, celebrate birthdays, tell jokes, do book reviews, surprising facts, etc. Now that the students (and I) have the hang of it, we have started to incorporate the green screen. We use an iPad on a tripod to record and a Macbook to use iMovie. I used a Donors Choose project to get two iPad tripod stands and two lapel microphones, but they are relatively inexpensive. I am including some screenshots from the shows and would be glad to share the videos with anyone who is interested in seeing one. It's definitely not professional, but it is fun! Kristi Allred, NBCT Media Coordinator North Davidson Middle School We have several holiday literacy activities taking place at Southmont!!! In order to encourage reading and creativity, we are hosting our first Book Character Ornament Contest. The contest involves creating an ornament that resembles a book character. All ornaments are being displayed on the tree in the entranceway of the school for the month of December and then will be sent home. A grade level winner will be chosen by a panel of judges and awarded a new book or a Top Secret UV Pen. This contest has generated a lot of discussion on book characters and the students are so proud of their new keepsake. We are also planning a Holiday Book Swap on Friday, December 14th. Each student will bring in 5 gently used books to swap for 5 books to take home. Our goal is for all of our students to have new reading material over the break. The Holiday Book Swap will take place in our library and will resemble a book store where students will select their 5 new books and receive a new bookmark. We hope the holiday literacy activities will get our students excited about READING! |
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