Empowering My Students to Become True STEM Note-Taking Warriors
Help me give my students the many pre-made tiny color diagrams, charts, and graphic organizers that help them to transform themselves into the STEM Note-Taking superheroes at our selective urban magnet school. They need a color printer.
PROBLEM: Gifted students who enter our selective urban magnet school need a lot of support to learn how to take notes in fast-paced math and science classes. This is why I *actively* teach 9th and 10th-grade students every day how to take good notes, how to summarize and annotate their notes, and how to synthesize their understanding into a summary reference sheet. Mastering these note-taking, note-keeping, and note-using techniques give all students an even footing for advanced STEM classes and college lecture classes where they will have only their own notes to review as they work towards mastery.
SOLUTION: One secret to preparing our diverse, high-achieving STEM students for advanced courses is to scaffold note-taking instruction with pre-printed tiny diagrams, charts, and tables that students can glue into their notes as they are still learning to become expert note-takers.
Providing these supports saves students time as they master the skills of capturing, organizing, and summarizing the kind of dense, fast-paced information they will encounter in their advanced STEM courses.
My Project
This printer will replace the brave but underpowered one that gave its life enabling me to discover this true secret of teaching students how to process and digest massive amounts of new STEM material quickly.
By allowing me to quickly create complex, subtle tiny diagrams, charts, and graphic organizers that my high-achieving, high-poverty students can glue into their notes, I can reduce the cognitive burden of re-drawing these diagrams so students can develop the skills they will need to be true STEM note-taking warriors in their advanced math, science, and technology courses.
This is something that all students report valuing about my classes.
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Dr. Statmore and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
