A Visit from President Washington

Did anyone else see George Washington in the 6th grade hall last week? I did. Pam Koury used a great costume and wig to energize her students in another fun and creative review activity for her students.

Mrs. Koury had just finished a poster project in which students created time lines based on historical themes. Students were given the task of developing pictures reflecting symbols of the United States, such as an Eagle, Rolling Hills, and a Train. The pictures used significant points on them to represent a sequence of thematic events in U.S. history. Students were put into groups and given choice to select themes and historic events associated with them. Students where highly engaged throughout the activity since they were able to work on themes of their personal interest. Of course, this activity reinforced many Lifelong Learning Skills and was a great way to incorporate art.

George Washington showed up about a week later. In the styling of mystery dinner theater, Mrs. Koury being George Washington, Mrs. Thurston as Robert E. Lee (minus the commissioned grey) and all other students given a character within their curriculum. George sets up the plot and the mystery to solve.  Student groups move from station to station where they find clues to help them solve the mystery. Clues provide information based on primary source items. Student groups have to point out specific information in their process of eliminating suspects throughout the room. The culprit is one of the student characters and given the directive to act inconspicuous throughout the activity.

What makes this classroom mystery review effective is how it is aligned to the curriculum. All clues are accurate historical events. Students have to justify a characters involvement and accusations of guilt based on actual events relating to the required curricular review. This is difficult for 6th graders as they get caught up in the fun, but guides them in siting the evidence accurately.

Cold War Drama at HMS

Check out this great lesson that our seventh grade social studies students participated in recently.  Thanks to Assistant Principal Jason Crutchfield for the write-up!

On the Brink

You are the President of the United States during the height of the Cold War. You have just found out that Fidel Castro has been allowing the Soviets to store and set up nuclear missiles less the 100 miles off the coast of the United States. How do you know this? You have just been presented sets of satellite photographs of the missiles being transported and set up. What are you going to do?

This was the charge to Mr. Strzepek , Mrs. Bledsoe and Mrs. Goodin’s 7th grade Social Studies classes last week. 7th grade US2 students were given the opportunity to relive the Cuban Missile Crisis, through this authentic Cold War experience. Students were placed into groups, as they imagined that they were members of President Kennedy’s Cabinet, preparing to provide him a recommended course of action.

The teachers join in the fun by playing top advisors to the President. Their enthusiasm sells the lesson and provides a motivating environment. TOP ADVISERS to the President, provide student groups with great primary source documents; satellite images of Cuban missile sites. Once analyzed, they first come up with their own creative solution to the crisis. The Top Advisors then generalize the students’ original solutions, to develop a list of possible responses to the crisis.

Once all possible responses are considered, the teachers reveal the actual response used by President Kennedy. Students are proud to find that their original responses were very similar to what government officials considered.

Using this simulation strategy, students were able to apply many of the Lifelong Learning Standards in learning about the Cuban Missile Crisis. LLS#’s 2-4 and 6, seem the most appropriate to me. If I had to choose just one, it would be #6, Apply and adapt a variety of appropriate strategies to solve new and increasingly complex problems.

Teacher Appreciaiton Week

I would like to take a moment to thank all of our teachers for the work that they do day-in and day-out to enrich the lives of the children who walk into Henley each day. Until you have walked in the shoes of a teacher, you never know how challenging, frustrating and rewarding their work can be. It takes someone very special to dedicate their lives to teaching. We all need a little pick me up every now and then, so here are a few quotes about our work that I hope will make our teachers feel good. I hope they all enjoy this week and the small tokens that we have in place to honor all of them.

•  The dream begins with a teacher who believes in you, who tugs and pushes and leads you to the next plateau, sometimes poking you with a sharp stick called "truth." ~Dan Rather
• In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work. It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years. ~Jacques Barzun
• Teaching creates all other professions. ~Author Unknown
• If a doctor, lawyer, or dentist had 40 people in his office at one time, all of whom had different needs, and some of whom didn't want to be there and were causing trouble, and the doctor, lawyer, or dentist, without assistance, had to treat them all with professional excellence for nine months, then he might have some conception of the classroom teacher's job. ~Donald D. Quinn
• Modern cynics and skeptics... see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing. ~John F. Kennedy
• A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary. ~Thomas Carruthers
• Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater. ~Gail Godwin
• A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. ~Henry Brooks Adams
• A good teacher is like a candle - it consumes itself to light the way for others. ~Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, translated from Turkish

Our Golden Apple Winner

It is my great honor to announce that the 2012-2013 Golden Apple winner from Henley Middle School is Tiffany Stauffer. It’s always a pleasure to walk down to Tiffany’s class to see her in action with her students. I never quite know what to expect when I walk in the door, but I know for certain that I’m going to see excited, engaged students—no small feat when you’re talking about a middle school math class. One of the things that really stands out to me about Tiffany is how much care and concern she shows for each of her students. She is often here before school working with kids, she has multiple STING groups that come to her for tutoring, she loves to break down data and dig deep to uncover the keys to student success. Outside of the classroom, Tiffany is a great leader and colleague. She has provided strong leadership to the math department for the past few years and is always well versed on the latest in best practice in math education. She works diligently with her PLC team and builds relationships with middle school math teachers at other middle schools and at some of our feeder elementary schools. In the summer, when she’s not on her latest exciting road trip, you can find her teaching professional development classes for other math teachers. Her incredible dedication shows through each and every day, and I know she is not exaggerating when she talks of how little down time she has, let alone time to sleep. Tiffany has been a great addition to our Henley math team, and she is quite deserving of this award. Way to go, Tiffany. It is great to see you honored in this way.

Welcome to the final quarter!

Welcome back from Spring Break, everyone!  I hope that you add had a wonderful relaxing week with your families and that you are ready to get back to school for the final nine weeks of school.  This past marking period has been an incredibly busy time at Henley Middle School.  We have seen our students achieve at high levels in both the science fair and in National History Day, eighth graders completed their SOL writing test, our parks and rec sponsored volleyball team brought home another championship, we hosted student/faculty basketball and volleyball games, parents filled the building for our annual Expo Night and Talent Show, and, oh yeah, we missed a couple of days due to snow.  Time flies when you’re having fun!

Things probably won’t be slowing down too much as we push our way toward the end of the school year.  Just in the next few weeks we’ll have activity period, our last school-wide dance of the year, marching band season begins with the Dogwood Parade, our SOL testing really gets rolling in May and spring sports are in full swing for many of our kids.  Busy times, indeed. 

When life gets as busy as it is now, I always encourage parents to take some time to ensure that we aren’t overloading our kids.  Above all, my goal at Henley is to have a school filled with happy, healthy kids.  That usually can’t happen when a student’s day is scheduled to the minute.  School work and extracurricular activities are important, but so is down time that is unstructured and lets our kids decide what they want to do.  I encourage you all to strive to find that balance.

This school year has been a great one so far.  We’ve got such wonderful, talented students and teachers at Henley that it makes coming to work each day a breeze.  Enjoy the spring weather and the final weeks of the school year.  June 12 will be here before you know it and we’ll all be moving on to high school or our next grade at Henley.  Enjoy it, work hard and be sure to take time to stop and smell the roses.

Stem and the 4 C's

You’ve probably heard a lot lately about STEM. It’s an acronym for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math and it’s getting a lot of press because it is becoming more and more clear that jobs in these fields are booming and there are not enough qualified workers to fill them. I read an article in EdWeek recently that had some pretty interesting statistics. For example, STEM fields are expected to grow by 17% over the next decade or so, with other fields growing only 9.8%. Another interesting fact from the article was that nationwide across all employment fields, there are 3.6 people competing for every one job available, in STEM fields there is 1.9 jobs for every one applicant. This is a sector for which we need to be preparing our students. That’s all well and good if your child already has a love for all things math and science, but what if their passions lie in language arts, the humanities or some other area? You shouldn’t feel at all that those areas aren't worthwhile or that STEM can't benefit their development as learners. That’s because the heart of STEM, what employers and colleges really want to see in their students and potential employees, is proficiency in the “four C’s”—curiosity, creativity, collaboration and critical thinking. These are the skills that we all should be striving to instill in our students. If we can build our students capacities and proficiencies in these areas, we are giving them the foundations to be great creative thinkers and problems solvers—the next generation of American innovators. It’s never too early to begin placing a focus on these skills—in fact, when kids enter school they are naturally curious, creative collaborators—if you need any evidence of this, walk into any kindergarten class in Albemarle County and you’ll see it pretty quickly. Somewhere along the path to college, these natural tendencies begin to diminish—I think it’s one of our jobs to keep tapping into them and developing them for our kids. Anyway—just some food for thought for today. If you are interested in the article, you can find it at
http://bit.ly/XWszei
Check it out if you get a chance, and spend some time thinking about how we can impact our children's lives for the better with the four C’s.

The Latest Lesson We Loved

Last week the seventh grade math team invited me down to their rooms to check out a lesson they were teaching on proportional reasoning and scale. The first thing I noticed as I approached the rooms was that students were sprawled everywhere in the hallway. Inside the rooms it was no different—groups of students all busily working on a really cool project. For this assignment, students were given a small printout of a picture of a hornet. They divided their picture into several grid squares, and then each member of the group selected squares and copied their portion of the picture using a much larger scale. As each student finished, they pieced their drawings back together and saw that they had, indeed, replicated the original drawing on a much larger scale. This was a great lesson for many reasons—it was highly engaging for the students to be learning a mathematical concept in a different way, it had great tie ins to Marzano’s similarities and differences work, it gave the students a sense of audience as they knew their work would be displayed for the whole class, and it allowed students to work cooperatively with others—if one group member failed to produce, the task could not be completed. It was great to see students working in this way on their math assignments. Great work Melanie, Linda and Andrea!