Geniuses Among Us

Parents,

If you are like me, you’ve heard of Julia Roberts, Taylor Swift, and Tom Brady.  These are the people who dominate popular culture and make news every day.  Kids idolize them because their skills make them seem larger than life.  Beyond that, kids idolize their wealth, their fame, and their accolades.  It is quite the lifestyle.

I wonder though, have you heard of Phil Baran, Ana Maria Rey, or Dina Katabi?  These three are far more amazing and deserve much more of our attention.  Phil is an organic chemist who is synthesizing complete compounds to make new drugs to help cure rare diseases.  Ana is an atomic physicist who is studying the properties of supercold atoms to understand how they interact.  Dina is a computer scientist who works to make wireless networks more secure and reliable.  Together, they are three of the 24 MacArthur Genius Award winners, given “….to talented individuals who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.”

Beyond the title and the accolades, all three and 21 others receive $625,000 to do with as they see fit.  But here’s the thing:  what makes these people amazing is that nearly all of them use the money not for fancy cars, diamond rings, and the like.  Instead they tend to pour it back into their own research, give it to charity, or donate it to a colleague who the see fit to support.

At Discovery Academy we are working to build an education for your children that instills in them the potential to be “geniuses.”  Geniuses who pursue research that might change the world.  Geniuses who make the impossible possible.  Geniuses who see a monetary gift as an opportunity to give of themselves.

-Mr. Reed-Swale

Be Heard!

Parents and Teachers,

I hope that as this and other blogs continue to grow, you spend some time getting to know more about our school and our STEM theme.  With that being said, please feel free to add your opinions and comments to this blog.  It’s an great way to keep the conversation going.

To add a comment, just click on the “Continue Reading” button at the bottom of a post.  It will give you a new window with a comment box.  It asks you to include a name and email so we don’t get some crazy folks just tossing up junk on our blog.  I will have to approve your first comment (safeguard) and then you’ll be free to continue commenting.  Please know I don’t ever use your email.  It’s just a way to verify that you’re you.

If you are wondering if a post already has comments, you can just check the orange speech bubble at the top of each post.  It lists the number of post comments.

I look forward to reading your comments soon as you weigh in on everything that is Discovery Academy’s STEM Theme!

-Mr. Reed-Swale

Student Laptops Make Their Discovery Academy Debut

Dear Parents,

Our current building poses some interesting challenges.  That list of challenges is long, but one great development has been the lack of a space for a computer lab.  Now normally that would be a negative, but in this case, it’s a huge positive.   At Discovery Academy, we now have a computer lab on wheels in the form of a laptop cart with 25 state of the art student laptops.  Just this week, the laptop cart made its Discovery Academy debut in our second grade classrooms.

Students in Mrs. Miller’s and Mrs. Worley’s rooms sat down for some challenging but engaging work on the new STAR assessments.  Normally, teachers would have to shift students through a few desktop machines.  Four students would log on, do their work, and then free up space for four more.  This is no longer the case at Discovery Academy.  We will use these laptops for countless engaging, and creative learning experiences for your students.  The possibilities are endless now that we can bring the technology right into the classroom.

I’ve attached some pictures below.  Notice the focus and determination on the students’ faces.  These boys and girls were taking nearly an hour’s worth of assessments and they were so engaged that when they finished Mrs. Worley said, “So let’s get cleaned up and ready for snack!”  One student quickly responded, “Wait, what?  It’s not that late is it?  How’d it get to be that late?”

I guess time flies when you’re learning and having fun at the same time!

-Mr. Reed-Swale

XtraMath Fluency Practice

Dear First and Second Grade Parents,

We have rolled out XtraMath to the first and second grade students over the last week.  XtraMath is a site set up specifically for your student through your student’s teacher.  What I really love about this program is that it responds to what your student needs in terms of fact practice.  As your he or she improves, the program works on more difficult problems.  If your student struggles, it reviews those challenging facts.  What is even better is that the work your student does at home is tied to the same work that he or she does in school.

In order to betterincorporate fact practice during instructional class time, as your child works on XtraMath each day, your teacher gets a detailed report that records every question and every answer that your child completes.

Fact fluency (knowing a fact within 3-4 seconds) is a key to unlocking further mathematical learning.  By helping your student get consistent daily practice on math facts through XtraMath, you will be instrumental to their success in school.

Flyers with your student’s login information and procedures was sent home last week.  If you have any questions about XtraMath, you can contact your student’s teacher and they will be able to give you all the details you need.

Happy fact practice.

-Mr. Reed-Swale

Building Blocks: More Than Meets the Eye

On Monday, Mrs. Granahan, Mrs. Fleming, Mrs. Smith-Horn, and I spent the day at the Connecticut Science Center.  As part of our work to bring cutting edge, research-based inquiry science instruction to students, we are involved in a program called Cultivating Young Scientists.  This program presents teachers with graduate level work on different science themes that all focus on the use of inquiry.  There are three themes for the program: water, nature, and structures.  Ms. Catizone, Mrs. Lynch, and Ms. Szymaszk are starting their work in water next week.  This week we were able to start our work with structures.  When I tell you that this was the most fun I’ve had in a class, I am not kidding.  We split our time between discussions on theory and practice, tasks involving structures, and reflection on our experiences.  When the day was done, all four of us felt invigorated and energized, wanting to get right back to the classroom and implement some of our new learning.

Before we get to that fun though, I want to take a moment to talk about why building structures is important and what students are learning when they engage in the building of structures.  First, let’s get right to it, as most people know it, building with structures is often called “playing with blocks.”  It’s an activity about as old as children have inhabited the planet.  Yet often, we set our children forth to play with blocks and think nothing more of it.  “Let’s build a tower!” we say.  “Can you build a wall?” we ask.  This is about as deep as most folks get but there is so much more to think about both as teachers and parents.  This was the real learning for us.  When you think about structures, we have to think about all the forces that are at play when trying to accomplish a building task.  You have to account for gravity.  You have to think about balance and center of gravity.  When building, your structure will undergo compression and tension.  All of these are important factors in creating a viable structure that will be able to stand.  When you think about it in the scientific light of forces, then the materials you choose become important.  What size block should you use to start?  What type of material will best support this structure?  How can we create a strong foundation with blocks that might not fit together?  All of these questions require that students account for the forces that are at play when building.  Even more, students are engaging in the scientific process constantly when building.  They are creating a hypothesis, testing that hypothesis, and they are making observations about the success, sway, and stability of their structure.  This process then informs the next build that a student begins.  One tip that our instructor gave us was to use blocks that did not interlock or use magnets.  At first I was disappointed.  This meant that I was not going to build with Legos and I love Legos.  But then when you think about it, the interlocking nature of Lego bricks cause them to act in ways that defy those forces discussed earlier.  Students are no longer being exposed to the same nature of gravity, friction, tension, and compression.  So for the purposes of science exploration and understanding at this level blocks that don’t interlock are an exceptional teaching tool.

So the next time you say to your child, “Let’s play with blocks!” you can change your language and say, “Let’s build a structure that has a strong base, a low center of gravity and resists the compression brought on by such a large mass.”  Or you could just keep that to yourself and know that you’re building a budding scientist who is becoming more and more engaged with the forces at play in the world.

Questions you might ask your engineer include but are not limited to:

What properties of this block will help it build a structure?

What type of structure would be best built by this type of block?

Which type of block would be best to build the foundation of your structure?

Why do you think your structure became wobbly?

What did you notice happen when you added that block?

Why do you think that happened?

What made your structure do that?

Why do you think your structure was/wasn’t successful?

What improvements can you make to your structure when you try it again? 

What did you learn from building this structure? 

Remember that the “Why?” and “How?” questions are the ones that will get you the best thinking.  “Can you build this taller?” “Yes!”  “How will you do that?”  “I’m going to use some of the smaller foam blocks because they are not as heavy as the wooden blocks and the wooden ones will make it fall like last time, so I’m going to make it taller by adding blocks that aren’t as heavy.”  The right question can really garner a great response.

Below you will find some pictures of our structures.  We were charged with a task to build the tallest structure we could while using three different types of blocks.  They had to be free-standing.  Ms. Fleming’s group was the winner of our little contest, building a massive structure that stood nearly 8 feet tall without any outside support.

-Mr. Reed-Swale

Nature, Exploration, and Bugs

This weekend my family too our annual trip to Sullivan, Maine just outside of Bar Harbor. As my son gets older and older, the difference in landscape and wildlife become more and more exciting for him. This year was especially significant. Last year he had discovered a few caterpillars and this year he was determined to find any and every species of them imaginable. It got to the point where he had a tub full of 10-15 different kinds of “spiky ones, blue ones, even ones with FUR Daddy!” His sister, not to be left alone with the adults, decided to join the exploration and the two of them took it upon themselves to surprise me with a jar full of six huge yellow garden spiders. At one point my daughter was holding one in the palm of her hand.  Needless to say we calmly asked her to gently set it on the ground.  It was a tricky parenting moment for us to say the least.

I’d love to tell you that I had some intricate plan for two days of scientific exploration, that I sent them on a mission to find and collect all new species of insect. Instead, it was my two children, ages 5 and 3 that drove the learning, walking through chest-high grass on their way to discovery. They were just plain curious about the new environment before them. And they weren’t just excited to find the next neat colored insect or arachnid. They would constantly come back, bug in hand, asking “What’s this one?” or “Do you know what this is?” It got to the point where my friend Hawk found them a field guide on butterflies and moths. Teagan couldn’t read it yet, but he knew how to use it, thumbing through the pages looking for just the right caterpillar that he found. It was an amazing experience to watch my children explore like this.

As they say in the education world, this was a perfect teachable moment.  It was a time when my children wanted to know about the world around them and were looking for answers.  We discussed how bright colors are a way to say “danger.”  How you need to handle insects with care.  We had a discussion about how even though they are small, insects need air to breathe too.  We looked at legs, observed movement, noticed slime, and felt shells.

When teaching, I encounter these teachable moments all the time.  Sometimes in the middle of lesson, they are not what I was planning on addressing, but they are a chance to make a piece of learning stick.  The same can be true at home.  While it may not be the most convenient time to discuss what the numbers on the back of a label mean or why some grocery items are measured in ounces as opposed to milliliters, these are the moments when you can tap into your child’s curiosity and help him or her learn something that he or she is craving to know.  Enjoy these moments and don’t be afraid to say “I don’t know” too.  It’s a perfect way for them to see that adults are learning every day too!

Have a great week.

Tom