El Boletín
Volume 8 May 4, 2012 Issue 36
This Week At Elida
Prom – UNOH Event Center – 8:00 p.m. May 5th
SUCCESS Field Trip to the Mosque May 7th
Underclassman Awards – Classes delayed 1 hour for Seniors – 8:00 a.m. May 11th
Upcoming Events
Band Concert – 3:00 p.m. May 13th
Choir Concert – 7:30 p.m. May 15th
Senior Exams May 17/18th
Senior Awards Ceremony – 7:30 p.m. May 17th
Art Show -1:00 p.m.-6 p.m. High School Commons May 19th
Band Concert – 3:00 p.m. May 20th
Senior Exam Make up May 21st
Graduation Rehearsal – 9:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m. May 23rd
Underclassman Exams May 25/29th
Graduation – 1:00 p.m. May 27th
Memorial Day May 28th
Last Day of School – 2 hour early release May 29th
Teacher Work Day May 30th
Bulldog Birthdays
Linda Spayd May 10th
Jim Baxter May 10th
Thought of the Week – “Education begins at home. You can’t blame school for not putting into your child what you don’t put into him” Geoffrey Holder
Student News
Congratulations to Chris Radebaugh for being named a National Merit Scholarship winner. Chris will be receive his scholarship from The Ohio State University. Great job Chris!
Congratulations to the Elida FFA Outdoor Power & Equipment Team for placing8th in the Ohio FFA Career Development Event on Friday. Individual placings were: Zac Siefker 7th out of 63 individuals, Alex Shaw-Roberts 29th and Dustin Bolenbaugh 50th.
Latin Club News
On April 19th, the Latin Club toured the Toledo Museum of Art. This is the second annual trip! The Latin Club members who were a part of the club last year went on a self-guided tour under the guidance of Joe Whittaker. The first year Latin Club members participated in a scavenger hunt, with a group of Latin II students winning. Some of the art work included sculptures and drawings from the time of the Ancient Roman civilization, paintings from the Middle Ages, abstract art, etc.
New Program Piloted at EHS
Elida Family and Consumer Science students will be taking part in BEEFonomics on Monday, May 7th. The presenter coming to Elida is Ms. Donnelly who is the vice president of Ohio Cattlewomen. The Ohio Beef Council is in the process of piloting its BEEFonomics program
in FCS classrooms around the state in the closing months of this school year. The council has been working closely with the Ohio Department of Education and FCS consultant Mary Jo Kohl to adapt a curriculum and align program standards to offer a program that is useful and advantageous for students. With these endeavors, the council is happy to say that they believe this one-day course has the potential to do great things in snow-balling off of standards currently in place.
A Moving Proposal
Robert J. Marzano
Teachers who are sensitive to the role of movement in enhancing engagement will have greater success in sustaining students' attention levels.
Routinely encouraging students to move their bodies in the classroom probably increases student engagement, which, in turn, supports student learning. Indeed, this is what a growing body of evidence suggests.1
Teachers can productively use movement in their classrooms by drawing on two categories of activities.
Movement That Deepens Understanding
In general, movement that is directly related to content acquisition should be the teacher's first choice. A number of activities are appropriate for a variety of grade levels and subject areas.
Give One, Get One
For this activity, the teacher asks students to stand and find a partner. The partners compare notes on a particular topic with a goal of both giving new information to their partner (give one) and receiving new information from their partner (get one). Pairs also generate questions that the teacher answers in a whole-class setting. Students stand all the while, thus providing some movement and variety. At the end of the activity, students record what they have learned electronically or in a notebook, adding necessary updates and corrections.
Voting with Your Feet
A teacher typically uses this activity after asking a multiple-choice question with lettered alternative answers (for example,a,b,c, ord). The teacher places one of four posters, each with a different letter, on each wall of the classroom and asks students to move to the poster that represents the answer they consider correct. Before disclosing the answer, the teacher asks one or more students in each group to explain why they think their choice is correct. In this way, students get to consider each answer. The teacher might extend the activity by allowing students to move to a different choice before he or she reveals the correct answer.
Corners Activities
In this activity, students assemble in different corners of the classroom to discuss various aspects of a topic. For example, during a unit on civil disobedience, a social studies teacher might want students to consider the following questions: What are the defining characteristics of civil disobedience? How can civil disobedience advance democracy? How can civil disobedience impede democracy? When did you use a form of civil disobedience to a productive end? Each of the four questions is posted in a corner of the classroom, and each corner has a student recorder—someone who stays at that corner throughout the activity.
After selecting recorders, the teacher organizes the class into four groups. Each group goes to one of the corners for about five minutes, during which time students discuss the assigned question and the recorder writes a summary of the group's comments. Each group then moves to another corner, where the recorder briefly shares the comments of the previous groups. The new group subsequently adds its comments.
After each group has visited each corner, the recorders summarize the comments for the whole class. Teacher and students then engage in a whole-class discussion aimed at generating generalizations about the topic.
Drama
Drama activities should be brief and move quickly. A teacher might organize students into small groups and assign each group a topic or choice of topic. For example, a mathematics teacher might have students do brief sketches that illustrate mean, median, or mode. After each sketch, the observing students question the players about the topic.
Body Representations
In this activity, students are asked to stand and briefly illustrate vocabulary terms that the teacher calls out. For example, a mathematics teacher might call out the termrectangle. Students then attempt to represent a rectangle with their bodies. Next, the teacher might call outsquare, and students change their body representations to fit the term. After a few more rounds, students take their seats.
Movement That Boosts Energy
Not all movement activities need to directly link to content. Sometimes it's necessary to get students moving simply to boost their energy levels.
Movement increases the amount of oxygen to the brain. Consequently, when a teacher sees that students' attention levels are waning—for example, during a class period right before lunch—he or she might ask students to stand up and take a stretch break. At the elementary level, I've seen teachers ask students to run in place or engage in a quick set of jumping jacks.
Teachers who wish to apply brain research2 might construct activities that stimulate both hemispheres of the brain. For example, during a stretch break, the teacher might guide students through stretches that require parts of the body on the left side to connect to parts of the body on the right side and vice versa, such as touching the right elbow to the left knee and then touching the left elbow to the right knee.
Every Bit Helps
Movement in the classroom is a small, but potentially important, part of effective teaching. Teachers who are sensitive to the need for student engagement—and the role of movement in enhancing that engagement—will have greater success in sustaining students' attention levels.
Endnotes
1 Marzano, R. J., Pickering, D. J., & Heflebower, T. (2011).The highly engaged classroom. Marzano Research Laboratory: Bloomington, IN.
2 Jensen, E. (2005).Teaching with the brain in mind(2nd ed.). Alexandria, VA: ASCD.