NBES gets $4,500 grant from Lowe's

NORTH BROOKFIELD - On Monday, Jan.12, North Brookfield Elementary School was awarded a Lowe's Toolbox for Education Grant in the amount of $4,500.

These funds will be used to build an outdoor classroom to be utilized by all students in grades K-6. The outdoor classroom will have picnic tables that will allow the school's "Reading Buddies" program to enjoy the outdoors while the older students assist their younger "buddies" to learn to read. In addition, garden areas will be developed and "adopted" by grade levels for students to study the lifecycles and ecosystems of their particular garden.

NBES receives new technology grant

NORTH BROOKFIELD - North Brookfield Elementary School has recently received a $5,000 grant from the Roy Foundation. The money will be used to provide access to a new computer program called the Renzulli Learning System. The program is designed by the leading researchers in the area of differentiated instruction and gifted learning, Dr. Joseph Renzulli and Dr. Sally Reis from the University of Connecticut.

The program will allow pupils to complete a full learning profile of their interest areas, and then allow pupils and teachers to design projects based on their own particular interests. It also provides easy access to the best educational Web sites available, by filtering out sites that don't meet the Renzulli qualifications for excellence.

Teachers recently attended training on the new program, and after a pilot program is run for the remainder of this school year, it is expected that all pupils will be using Renzulli for the 2009-10 school year.

One of the best facets of this program is that parents and students will have the same access to this system from their home computers, as well as from the school.

NBES receives $5K Best Buy Teach Award

NORTH BROOKFIELD - North Brookfield Elementary School recently announced that it has received a $5,000 Teach Award from Best Buy Co. Inc. for integrating interactive technology into its classroom curriculum.

Leslie A. Murray, Grade 6 English Language Arts teacher and former technology teacher for the elementary school, created the program that received the 2009 award. She created the project several years ago in an effort to combine original poetry by Grade 6 pupils into an innovative computer slideshow. The work is done in the computer lab and in the classroom. Murray felt she needed to motivate the children to love and create poetry. Combining their poetic creations with the learning of the Microsoft PowerPoint program created an added bonus for pupils and Murray. The resulting project was that the pupils are required to design a cover slide, a biopoem slide and a minimum of four additional slides of original poems.

Extensive research is done in the classroom to review the different types of poetry and how to write each form. Pupils then begin writing and saving poems for use in the project, as well as collecting poems they love written by other authors. Meanwhile, in the computer lab, Murray teaches them how to use the PowerPoint program. As the pupils become familiar with the program, they begin to input their favorite poems, while focusing heavily on choosing the right backgrounds, graphics, colors, animations and sounds to highlight the poems featured in the slides. The pupils also choose a song to so choose a song to feature as one slide and study how song lyrics are a form of poetry, the soundtrack of the song is then implemented into the show, as part of the slide. This becomes the "finale" of their slide show. The completed shows are shown to parents and friends at the end of the school year in the auditorium.

The grant will provide an LCD projector, laptop, motorized screen and cart to display the shows in the auditorium, as well as for teaching use in the computer lab, a laser printer, a scanner, 22 sets of headphones, and a phone system for the computer lab.

"My computer background has always resulted in my English classes having a strong technology component." said Murray. "The students' excitement about the project is contagious, once they learn about what we are going to do, they come into the class with notebooks full of original poems they have written for the project. Students that you would never imagine would do so can't stop writing poetry. They show up before school, during recess, whenever they can to work on the project. Near the end, I'm in a full lab right through lunch with the kids.

"Although a minimum of six slides are required for the project, last year over 75 percent of the students produced slide shows with well over 20 slides," Murray added. "They all realized the value of a poem that could express their thoughts or feelings by the time the program was completed. The positive outcome of the project has been more than I could ever have wished for. As these children leave elementary school and enter junior high, they do so with an enthusiasm and appreciation for poetry and technology that is amazing."

This year, Best Buy Teach Awards ranging from $1,000 to $10,000 have been given to more than 460 schools to sustain or enhance existing educational programs.

"Teachers are finding creative ways to engage students by using technology hands on, we want to support their efforts by helping them enhance or expand these programs." said Paula Prahl, senior vice president of public affairs, communication and corporate responsibility for Best Buy Co. Inc. "We know that schools are the cornerstones of these communities where our employees, customers, and their families live and work."

Since 2003, The Best Buy Teach Awards Program has rewarded schools that creatively integrate interactive technology into their curricula. Over the past five years nearly
6,000 schools nationwide have received $1.7 million in Teach Awards.