I teach in an awesome school system with so much potential. We have a mixture of students that live in the suburbs and open-enrollment students from the city. Students come ready to learn; however, are not always provided with the resources to work to their full potential, both at their homes and at our school due to lack of funding.
I have had the pleasure to house and educate the full-inclusion classroom that is filled with students with and without disabilities for two years now.
I co-teach with a special education teacher. Together we try to create a differentiated, fun lessons that engage ALL students at ALL ability levels. We try to create an atmosphere that accepts student differences and embraces each and every one of their skill levels.
All of the students in our second grade come from diverse backgrounds and many difference ability levels. As a team, we try to provide them with multi-modal learning opportunities to make sure we reach every student's needs.
My Project
I am hosting a STEM "March Madness" Family Night incorporating the sport of basketball to demonstrate to parents and students how they can use sports as an opportunity to learn about science, technology, engineering, and math. With that said, I am facilitating a "March Madness Family STEM Night" to provide the students and families in my class with opportunities to learn in a themed way about science, technology, engineering, and math. My students are invited to come and learn at high interest, grade level appropriate stations that incorporate basketball themed STEM activities to complete with their families.
Each child will receive and keep a basketball as a way to not only motivate students to come, but be used for various STEM activities throughout the night.
In addition to that, they will be able to bring the ball home and be able to use it to experiment with even more sports themed STEM activities.
The stations will include designing a tower to support a basketball, shooting a basketball and calculating which angles shot make the most amount of hoops, calculating how many dribbles it takes to walk the court, measuring distances on the basketball court, creating basketball catapults, and estimating and weighing the air in the balls. My hope is that by getting students there, they will be able to understand how important various STEM concepts are to all sports and see science, technology, engineering, and math in a new light triggering their interest in STEM for the future!
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