Recycled Bottle Greenhouse

While student teaching at an area elementary school, I was given the freedom to implement my own curriculum for part of the school day. I initiated a class garden, and with it being mid-January, the idea for a class greenhouse soon followed. Our greenhouse design was was inspired by a similar structure built out of recycled 2 litre bottles at the National Botanic Garden of Wales as part of a recycling expo. I thought such a group project could galvanize the class and would also offer us a wealth of different learning opportunities through the winter. Students helped collect some 1300 bottles for the construction and came away from the project with great first hand knowledge of the importance of reuse and recycling.

Tile Project to Celebrate Fall

Children's Picture Book

During my first year of graduate school, I elected to create a children's picture book as part of a semester long project. Using Mixbook, an online desktop publishing service, I created We're Out of Eggs, Jack. This is the true story of how my son, Jack, goes for a wagon ride down to the farm at the end of our street every time his mom runs out of eggs. The story was created for beginning readers and would be a useful tool for introducing young readers to farm related vocabulary. The Mixbook application is very user friendly. With some assistance, it would definitely be a valuable tool for students to document their own work or to showcase their own stories. You can share your finished work through social media or even elect to have it bound into an actual book.

A Thematic Unit: The Learning Tree

This short film was made as part of an assignment that asked me to conceive of a learning event and then share that event with others on the web. The learning tree activity is not my own idea, but it does have many of the properties I feel are essential to good elementary education. This activity helps develop student's powers of observation, connects them with changes that occur as part of natural cycles, and through a long term journal writing activity, provides them with a continuum to express their observations in a highly personalized manner. As I express in the film, this activity could be further developed to have an extra cultural feature through partnering with another class somewhere else in the world. Comparing the different observations from students elsewhere in the world would likely prompt further cultural or scientific inquiries.

Webquest: History of Appalachian Music

Last year I participated in an activity designed to explore Webquests and their potential for helping teachers design meaningful learning events. Webquests are essentially an inquiry-based, online learning activity where students work in groups, dividing assignments among each other to explore a given topic. The objective of the activity is to promote "transformative" learning outcomes, accomplished through the reading, analysis, and synthesis of Web-based informationWorld Wide Web. This was a really fun project for me as it allowed me to become a musicologist for the month. I designed a webquest to help students explore the celtic roots of Appalachian music. Even if you don't wish to engage in this webquest as a formal learning activity, it is definitely worth your time if you have an interest in Celtic or Appalachian music as I've amassed a pretty significant archive of music and film relating to this topic. I think this particular webquest would hold as much interest for a class in Ireland or Scotland as it would for one in my area of Southern Appalachia. Anyway, here's the link to my webquest