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.:
http://scratch.mit.edu/studios/373147/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:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WXwnMZTeIcZYLMyB_seGqaZ8R9JOhFQTh-wXP17…
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
