You should see what our PLC is doing....I mean its some darn good work....I am pretty impressed. We are calling it Global Integration....and tomorrow they are reading a science article but doing the English and History way to read....We are putting all for content teachers in the room at the same time as all of the 9th graders and modeling how to read for understanding. Then in Oct we are taking ALL of our 9th and 10th graders to Kill Creek. There will be 10-12 stations, the sophomores will be in charge of the 9th graders to promote leadership and we are doing our typical math and science activities, just like last year. THIS year we are incorporating the English and History. They are reading Thoreau's poem as a model for descriptive writing and then they will have to write a description of Kill Creek. They will also write a persuasive essay at the end of this trip, picking a topic near and dear to their heart. And we have the history of the Sunflower Ammo Plant and the Brown Field, along with some mapping and prediction skills. And some Geo Caching, some Trig, classifications, measuring, area, volume, surface area, sampling populations, etc... This is like a well oiled machine, my team...I am in AWE and so happy to be working with them. And the kids like it sooo much better when everything connects and makes sense. Our goal is, in 4 years, we have incorporated all the core courses, as well as our engineering courses throughout our entire SLC. I think we can do it and I am pretty excited....

Kill Creek Planning Session

Today, September 26th, 2012 (at 12:45 pm) we gathered to to discuss our introductory exercise for the freshmen to get them acquainted to the subject of watershed ecology.

We talked in detail about what we were going to do to fulfill our major objective -introduction to the concept of watersheds and their health/composition. We created a strategy for what each teacher was going to do during the presentation. We took into account our students' characteristics and learning abilities. We discussed and designated which teachers would model the learning behaviors we want the the students to practice, and which teachers would do the modeling.

We discussed how we would proceed onto the next text to study and how we would approach it.

We examined and assessed our students' need for explicit modeling, and their emotional maturity, focusing on particulars about their fear of asking other students for help how they are unusually lacking in the ability of advocate for their own needs.

We then moved on to discuss our field trip to the Kill Creek watershed. Dr. Hotz detailed the people who would be leading the different areas of investigation, studying quality of water, animals.  We decided to incorporate a literacy piece involving reading a descriptive text about ecological matters, followed by students responding in a detailed descriptive piece about their surroundings, and capped off by a persuasive response to how to aid watersheds.

We will have students perform "geocaching," mapping, calculations of area, and perimeter, including trigonometry. We will examine a map of the Kill Creek watershed from ten years ago, and compare it with a modern rendering. We will also, study the wildlife, keeping focus mainly to this aspect.

Students will be tasked with studying distribution of various ecological elements, and make predictions about future conditions, thus enhancing students abilities to think in a more formal manner ( thinking about things in a subjunctive way- about things that they aren't actually seeing).

Julie asked about how to divide the activities the students would perform with the time we have available. We estimate establishing between eight to ten stations, with varying times -longer times for writing stations.

There will be representatives from KU, the EPA, the Schlagle library, and district offices, as well as the staff members of this PLC, an estimated twelve or more adults participating.

Lesley brought up that an exercise of this importance should have media representation. We discussed having yearbook staff or a responsible upperclassman cover this.

Lesley also mentioned the historical aspects of the location that may provide fruitful data for our study, namely the issues surrounding contamination of the area by the ammunition plant that once resided there, and how ecological concerns prompted the need create a "brownfield" whereby the ecosystem was allowed to reclaim the land, enabling natural processes to eliminate the industrial contamination.

We concluded that this project is well underway and progressing in a satisfactory way.

9/26/12

Cross-Curricular classroom development - Prepped for Thursday's article reading of The Poisoning of America's Water Supplies.  Worked out who was leading which portions of the activity and how the reading and question answering would proceed.

Field trip prep - Kill Creek
  - EPA - water testing w/mussels
  - macro-invertebrate testing
  - Writing/reading Stations - Persuasive writing - why people should care about Kill Creek, Descriptive Writing -
 - KU Professors and grad students coming to assist
 - Preform a geocashing
  - Calculations of volume, area and perimeter
  - Classification of animals 
  - Mapping - geography - view old map - create updated map from what they see

Some of the things we are learning as we attempt to create a solid core curriculum with a common theme, is one, the learning doesn't always have to be content, but also can be specific skills used in another class and two, while we all guard our time in our own content so closely, as you give up a little bit of time for another subject matter, the return is greater than the cost. Last week, Mike and I were rattling off several ideas at once and while Julie was receptive to the ideas, we could clearly tell she was outside of her comfort zone and struggling to see the specific connection to a particular sophomore course, World History. We assured her it would all work and she had buy in and was willing to try. This week, she put Dr. Hotz and I out of our comfort zones. She wanted to incorporate book studies into the 9th grade curriculum. We asked what her end result wanted to be at the end of 9th grade and what she wanted was for the 9th graders to be ready to go as a 10th grader in her course. After scaffolding the idea over 4 quarters we decided to start with an article together over watersheds, the content in science, and she and Ken would teach the structure. The questions at the end of the article were only slightly tweaked to use math and science words, like make predictions, to show the similarities in the English/History curriculum. The second quarter we are going to use advisory time to take the 9th graders to the library and learn how to research their own articles that we will use for credit in English and Science. The content for Science and the process for English and Math. Then hopefully 3rd and 4th they will be doing a larger article up to a book and the goal is to have a book ready to go over the summer for their first world history assignment starting in the fall. We are also looking at adding a half of credit geography class to the 9th grade GET curriculum in order to fully gel the core classes. Our hope is in 4 years we have a fully functioning SLC that fully utilizes the SLC and theme into all the core classes.

We spent our time developing "Get Smart Global Integration" project involving all global core teachers.
This project will involve using the skills particular to each core teacher to examine a focused subject related to an already ongoing program began by Dr. Hotz and Ms. Hornberger.

The idea is that the project centers around one subject of inquiry (Related to the ecological aspects of the Kill Creek as it relates to the greater watershed), and the various core teacher will integrate their areas of competency toward developing skills that our students can use in all of their classes, not just in each class individually.








September 24th (Monday) article review, which will include all core class skills.