A couple of loved lessons

Here's one from assistant principal Ashby Johnson:

Mrs. Thomas’ creative writing class has been working on creating a blog and literary
magazine to share their writing online. The site is called the J.T. Henley Middle
School Daily Buzz. The 7th and 8th grade students have created the site to inform you
about the happenings at Henley. The blog is written by students with a focus on gaining
knowledge about events, fundraisers, and a wide variety of other topics. The literary
magazine, or Lit Mag, is where our Henley students can share their writing in an online
space for people to read and comment on. All the students have signed up for jobs like
publisher, writer, designer, tech support, editor, etc...so it is truly a team effort. The
students write through Writer’s Workshop in class, peer and self edit, then are able to
publish their writing online. It’s exciting to see how hard the students work in class and
how proud they are when their work gets published. Check out the blog posts and the
first posting in the Lit Mag at this address: http://henleybuzz.weebly.com

And one I saw a little while ago:

Last week I had a chance to stop by Adam Kuchta’s room to check out the work he was
doing with his sixth graders. In case you didn’t know, Adam and the rest of the CTE
teachers in the division are working hard to transform their programs so that they have
a stronger focus on things like engineering and programming. He had a great example
of this change taking place with a challenge for his sixth graders. The students have
been learning how to build and program Lego NXT robots. Last week they were given
a task to program their robots (which had been rigged with a magic marker on one of the
robotic arms) to draw a three and a half inch line on a paper, move seven inches forward
without drawing a line, and then repeat the cycle. Students had previously learned the
basics of the NXT programming software and worked first on their computers to build
a program they thought would meet the parameters of their challenge. In pairs, they
would load the program into their robots, give them a command to start and watch to see
if their program created the hoped for results. Most students that I saw did not get their
robots to perform in the way they had hoped on their first attempt, and this was really
a positive for the kids. They had to analyze the results of their program, problem solve
to figure out how to rewrite their program, and then try again to see if they were getting
closer to their goal. These kids were challenged with an authentic task, worked together
to solve it, and realized that failure is a key part of the learning process. A great lesson
all around!