BMS: Magic School Bus - 7th Grade Science/English

At BMS each year Science and English are integrated in a special interdisciplinary project where students create a children's book on a science concept modeled after the Magic School Bus series by Joana Cole and published by Scholastic. Today I was fortunate to be in Kimberly Materese's 7th grade Science class held in a computer lab, but you might have thought it was an English class, or maybe an Art class, or possibly a Technology or Library Media class. Wait a minute! It was!

Students were working on the story and layout of their children's book on computers, and each book focused on a specific science topic, such as gravity, Pluto, meteors, black holes, and others. (See topic list below.) In English class students worked on their nonfiction story to entertain and teach others about their science topic. Students were using their checklists and rubrics to self-assess their book. They were extremely excited and proud of their work. All students were focused on last minute efforts to perfect the mechanics, content, story and art work of their book, since the project is due tomorrow, April 9th.

Rita Hennessey, LMS, was also working with students on many aspects of their project, including the use of Noodletools to create a thorough Works Cited page for every book.

Thanks to Mrs. Matarese, here are the rubrics, checklists and other documents used for this project:

• The Magic School Bus Science book revised 08-09.doc
  
• Timeline and checklist.doc
  
• Magic School Bus Topics.doc
  
• Rubric-Science.doc
  
• Rubric-English.doc

... and a sample page from Matt and Jeremy's book on Gravity...

CMS: 6th Grade Research Project - Social Studies and ITL

6th grade social studies teachers, Glenn O'Neill and Lucille Hyland recently worked with John Horrigan, LMS, to plan and implement a research project on a disaster. After determining that there were plentiful resources, studens followed their interests around a spcific natural or man-made disaster, such as: the San Francisco earthquake, Pearl Harbor, the Irish potato famine, Hurricane Katrina, the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, the Titanic, or the Love Canal disaster.

Students used the online project guidelines and resources on the LMC page, which included the following:

• Questions to consider
• Disaster project note sheets
  
• A project rubric
• Instructions
• Photostory Tips
• Scanned pictures and music in the R -Drive
• Resources to develop background knowledge
• Specialized resources to develop more knowledge (books, magazines, Internet)
  
• Suggestions for interviewing, viewing videos
  
• Use of Noodletools to cite sources
  

This year was the first year for this Social Studies/ITL project and it was so successful that it will be done earlier in the year next year providing students with the opportunity to become oriented to their new library media center and to both apply and learn new information and technology literacy skills within a social studies context.

Here is one sample by Emily which focuses on the Irish potato famine:

BMS: Student ITL Committee

Meg Tiley, Assistant Principal, and I have been coordinating a student ITL committee for three years at BMS. This group meets before school three times a year with several subcommittee meetings throughout the year. The mission is to increase awareness of the importance of effectively utilizing information and technology at home and in teaching and learning activities at BMS. Currently two groups are focusing on two different initiatives: a call-in information literacy contest held for one week live on BAM (Bedford's TV Station), and a video contest which asks students to creatively focus on the technology that they use at home. The group has an ITL Student Committee Wiki for agendas, and notes. In the wiki each student and teacher is represented by a self-created avatar name and icon.
Meg Tiley said, "Bedford has over 30 students involved in the Student ITL committee. We were able to target those kids with technology interests from their elementary schools and we advertise committee participation school-wide. It has been a wonderful connection between the students and faculty and the needs of our students. Currently, we have one student representative on the faculty BMS ITL committee. As we all know, our students are steps ahead of us with regard to current technology. We have found the student ITL committee to be an invaluable part of the BMS community. Each year, the student ITL committee holds one to two ITL contests to get other students involved in Information and Technology Literacy and what it means to them and to BMS. It is my hope that the committee will continue to grow and that students will feel empowered around some of the decisions regarding technology within the classroom."