Tonight is the re-premiere for Touch on Fox TV. In the episode which airs tonight, Arthur Teller (played by Danny Glover) uses Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature to help Martin Bohm (Kiefer Sutherland) understand the complicated, number-based way his son Jake (David Mazouz) sees the world.

During the show, I’ll be on Twitter, answering questions about Fibonacci numbers. Follow me on @campsarah or follow @Highlights.

 

I spent two days last week at Saltillo Elementary School, visiting with all 4th grade students and leading a professional development session for teachers grades 3-5.

Everyone was very friendly and helped me work through a few technical glitches. Thank you, Maggie Dickson, fourth grade project director; Faye Bruce, librarian; Gena Yarbrough, district art specialist; Belinda McKinion, assistant principal; and Coke Magee, principal.

The students asked great questions, and were wonderful guides through the school as I made my way from classroom to classroom to sign books.

Once again, I brought along a wolfsnail and some prey snails. I also debuted the wolfsnail app in its trial format. The kids loved seeing the snail video.

Several teachers took the pictures I am posting here. Thank you.

Recent efforts to improve performance of the Jackson Public School‘s department of special education are beginning to bear fruit, according to Ms. Ann Moore, Associate Superintendent for Special Education for the Mississippi Department of Education.

Moore told members of the Mississippi Commission on School Accreditation that JPS had initially been resistant to the state department‘s technical support teams. “They are working with us now,” she said.

Moore credited Dr. Jayne Sargent, the interim superintendent of JPS, for the turnaround, saying the previous superintendent’s administration had been uncooperative.

When Ms. H. Ann Jones, a commission member and retired educator, asked about whether Moore’s department had had a recent follow-up visit, Ms. Moore said she is expecting a new report from JPS today and her office will schedule a visit after reviewing the report.

The commission voted today to set an April 26 hearing for Jackson Public Schools to present a case for keeping its accreditation.

The district has been out of compliance with federal rules regarding special education since November 2010. JPS also remains out of compliance in two other areas: financial reporting and compulsory school attendance. (These issues date to September 2011; if not cleared within 12 months, a hearing process could be triggered.)

Mr. Blake Wilson, a commission member and president of the Mississippi Economic Council, asked the state department of education staff to make public on the internet the information that the commission was given, including a timeline of letters of noncompliance, correspondence with JPS, follow-up visits, etc. The attorney advising the commission responded that the staff would do that, if it was legal and promised to check.

No JPS official spoke at the meeting. The only issue before the commission was whether to set a hearing date.

 

 

 

I had a lovely time on Friday at Madison Avenue Upper Elementary School, visiting with third and fourth graders. The star of the show was the wolfsnail I brought along. A few dozen students would have taken it home in a heartbeat.

Ansleigh Thornhill, the MAUE media specialist, took the photographs for this post. Thank you for inviting me, Ansleigh.

I traveled with Chastain Middle School’s Science Quiz Bowl Team to Columbus, Mississippi, for a competition. My youngest son was the captain of the Chastain “A” team.

Our family has had at least one child in this competition for the last four years. I was proud of both of Chastain’s teams. The “A” team was undefeated through 8 rounds, and lost to Tupelo in the semi-finals. One of the big wins was against cross-town rival St. Andrew’s Episcopal School. The “B” team, with three of the four members complete novices, didn’t win any matches, but they came awfully close, and we anticipate good things for them next year.

Thank you, David Blount, for this picture of the “B” team.

I appreciate the work Mrs. Roberta Hagler has put into preparing science quiz bowl teams across the years. This year, Mrs. T. McKenzie helped out, and accompanied the team to Columbus. Thank you.

I’ve been so busy with students I haven’t had much time to blog. We are in the final stage of our bookmaking, and the books look great. The third graders did a terrific job!

Students created stories in the broad categories of patterns and measurement. We had six groups of students. Four groups had four students each, and two groups had three students each. The groups worked together to brainstorm, write, storyboard, and take photographs.

After an initial visit, during which I talked about my Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature (read about it here), Beth West worked with the students to talk about what all math stories need. Together, she and the students developed a checklist. The group writing was a challenging part of this project. In order to facilitate the process, Beth and I worked with each group for about an hour — to help integrate disparate drafts and press for coherence in the math methods being deployed.

We spent the next full school day, working individually with groups to storyboard the photographs and then take them.

After the photographs were taken, we asked the groups to self-select for four tasks: chartist (to create any chart needed for an illustration on good paper), folder (to make the instant book out of the good paper), assembler (to order, trim, and glue photographs into the book), and scribe (to write the final text into the book). So, on our final two work days, we worked with groups according to their tasks. All six folders made their books at the same time. All the chartists made charts at the same time, etc.

This final picture is of the classroom teacher, Mrs. Lieb. She has been very patient with Beth and me as we invaded her classroom. Here she is enjoying reading one of the books for the first time. Thank you, Mrs. Lieb.

Patty Crosby took all but two of the photographs in this post. She also had the task of capturing the whole project on video. Thank you, Mom!

Thank you, also, Beth.

I learned a long time ago that anytime I planned to do a project with students, I’d better try it first myself.

So, today, I’m sharing my attempt at a math story illustrated with digital photographs. This is my current project with third grade students at Davis Elementary School. (Read this previous post for background.) Arguably, I’ve done this before. My Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature is a model text for this lesson.

My co-teacher, Beth West, and I aren’t asking the groups of third graders to write and illustrate a 32-page picture book, though. We’re asking them to write and illustrate an 8-page math story problem. The broad topics we asked them to write on were: patterns and measurement.

Beth created two useful documents to help students with this project: a graphic organizer and a checklist. I wrote a story titled Toby Knits a Blanket. In it, Toby wants to use a growing pattern to make a red, white, and blue baby blanket. The seeds for his growing pattern are 4 and 1.

You can see how I filled in the graphic organizer.

Then, I used an instant book made from a sheet of manilla paper to create a storyboard. I used it to match the photographs with the text.

I spent about an hour last week meeting with one of the third grade groups. Beth met with another group at the same time and their classroom teacher, Mrs. Lieb, had charge of the rest of the class. The group I worked with is writing a story about trying to find a library book in a library where the cataloging has gone crazy, but in a patterned kind of way. Beth’s group was writing about predicting which student might win the most classroom incentive prizes over a designated time period — based on a pattern established in the first few days of the competition.

I go back tomorrow to work with a third group. We have six groups in all, and we are eager to get started on the photography part of the project.

I dug these lego figures out of my boys’ containers so I could use them as models for my other story — involving measurement. These lego folks represent a classroom of students who are going to eat pudding at a party.

As my regular followers know, I am in the middle of a photography project with fourth graders at Davis Elementary School. With educators from the Mississippi Museum of Art and teachers at Davis, I am helping the students make field guides of the museum’s Art Garden.

I thought I’d share some statistics from our project.

Students: 43.

Cameras: 14.

Photographs Taken By Students: 1,493.

Field Guides: 10.

Photographs Selected for Field Guides: 46.

The students are busy with research and writing now. They will begin publishing soon. I can’t wait to see finished guides!

Murrah High School Quiz Bowl Team

I spent Friday evening and most of Saturday with Murrah’s Quiz Bowl team. The team participated in a tournament at the University of Mississippi; three of us parents drove. Both teams competed with great aplomb — the ‘B’ team, consisting of 5 freshmen and 1 junior, lost two before lunch. The ‘A’ team, three juniors and three sophomores, didn’t lose the second time until the finals of the B bracket. I was proud of them. (One fun fact about these quiz bowlers is that nine of the 12 are also members of the varsity soccer team.) Here are some photos.

 

Just think how tough we’ll be the next time we have our lone senior!

Fourth grade students at Davis Elementary spent part of their morning completing watercolor paintings inspired by their photographs from the Mississippi Museum of Art’s Art Garden. (You can see more about earlier stages of this project here.) Today’s lessons were taught by Carol Cox Peaster with help from Elizabeth Williams and Ivy Alley. I stopped by to take some photographs and help where I could. I was struck by what the students did to interpret their photographic images in the style of Walter Anderson.

I’ll show you a step-by-step by one of the students.

Here, she is beginning her final sketch — on the fine watercolor paper.

Here she is applying the black watercolor paint to the outline elements.

Here she is beginning to apply color.

Finishing the color.

Now, here’s a look at the image she took at the Art Garden.

Peaster used several books to showcase Walter Anderson’s style, including The Secret World of Walter Anderson by Hester Bass.
Here are some other examples of student work:

Outlining.

Color.
You can see that he is using his photograph as a reference. Here it is:

Some students were taking photographs of living things; others of textures and art sculptures.

Now, for his photograph:
And, finally.
Now, for her photograph:

I spent two days this week at Davis, guiding fourth graders as they chose photographs for their field guides. It is always fun to spend time looking through photographs, and these students took some interesting ones. You can see some of their images in previous posts here and here.

We had a few challenges as we worked through this process. First of all, we had a hard time making the 1,490 images accessible to students at school. There is a computer lab at school and there are a few laptops. We did not have/nor could we get permission (central office IT department permission) to save the images to the computer network. There was only enough hard drive space available in the computer lab to save one teacher’s groups’ photos to the hard drive of one computer. What ended up working was saving all the images to four separate jump drives, attaching each one to a computer in the lab, and accessing the images via the usb port.

I worked with each group for about 30 minutes. For the first three sessions each day, I had the help of the classroom teacher. Thank you, Mr. Gunther, Ms. Cross, Ms. West, and the other helpers who taught the rest of the students in the classroom.

Selection worked like this:

• Each student wrote his/her name and group number on an index card.
• Each student chose his/her top three photographs. Each student noted the photograph’s file number and a brief description.
• Then, each student shared with the group the descriptions of his/her top three photos. When there was overlap in photo subjects, I asked each student to pull up his/her image. Then, we talked about which image we preferred and why and took an informal vote. Generally, reaching consensus was pretty easy.
• It helped to remind the students that we wanted each page in the guide to have unique content, and it helped to remind them of the topic of their particular field guide. (In one instance, a student really liked her photo of a worm, but the group decided that her photo of a fly better fit the topic, which was insects.)
• As final selections were made, the student circled the image file number and short description on the index card.
• We printed each image on regular copy paper (by sending a print job to the school’s main copy machine in the office) for reference.
• At home in the afternoon, I uploaded the selected images to a local photo store, and ordered 4 x 6 inch prints.

I made a sample field guide this week using some photographs of mine. It helped today to have the model with me so students could visualize what their field guides will look like.

At this point, my involvement with this project will shift gears. I have completed my contact sessions with students. Next week, students will make watercolors with Carol Cox Peaster and Elizabeth Williams of the Mississippi Museum of Art. They will also continue their research, and begin to write the text that will accompany each photograph.