Hi everyone. My name is Jeffrey Gordon. I'm a 4th grade teacher at Ruby Bridges Elementary School in Alameda, where I've taught for seven years. My school's population is 80% free/reduced lunch (high poverty) and 10% of our students are homeless, as our population zone includes The Alameda Point Collaborative.
I've been developing a curriculum in Scratch, that I use to reinforce my math lessons. Each week, my students build a little modeler that reinforces that week's work in math. My students use their free time throughout the week to add to and change the projects. Here's a studio that my students have organized of some of those projects. We also use it to share resources for projects.:
My goal this year was to create a portable and modular curriculum to share with other teachers to use in their own classrooms. What I've come to understand, is that this is a basically unfeasible goal; while nearly every educator I show them to sees the value of the modelers instantly, none of them has felt comfortable leading their students to build them.
Here's a Google Doc of the curriculum in progress. I'm doing the page layouts this summer, but most of the actual projects have been coded and tested by kids at this point, and just need to be commented and laid out. I'm hoping to get about 25 lessons done over the next month or so:
I spoke to Matt about the issues you've had with liability and insurance concerns. It sounds like a new space might solve some of those problems, but I think I have an idea that may compliment the existing sudo-kids project.
Many elementary schools have art docent programs, which bring in community volunteers to lead students in art lessons while a teacher attends to the business of running the classroom. The liability and legal concerns in running one of these programs are relatively simple: volunteers will need to undergo a federal background check and Livescan fingerprinting. Districts have existing procedures in place for these sorts of things, which means the principal of the school will make the choice, rather than a committee of administrators (which is how most good things die in education.)
I could arrange matchmaking for docents and teachers, facilitate background checks, model the lessons for docents with actual students, and assist with teachers with integrating the curriculum into their everyday math instruction.
What I would need is one or two (to start) volunteers to work with a couple of known excellent educators and their 4th-grade students next year on a weekly basis. Those volunteers would need to be competent with Scratch and able to read and understand the code linked to above. That would mean about 60 kids would benefit.
If you have the time and inclination, please, look closely at the modelers and the curriculum.
If anyone is interested in working with me, there are a couple of weeks left in the school year, and I'd be happy to demo a lesson with my students.
Thanks,
Jeffrey Gordon
4th Grade Teacher
Ruby Bridges Elementary School
Alameda, CA