Last March there was a devastating hurricane and tsunami in Japan that "ravaged Japan, taking thousands of lives, and destroying coastal communities." (quotation taken from a newsletter from studentsrebuild.org)
A fund-raising call went out to the world asking students to help with the healing by folding and sending cranes to the organization. The Bezos Family Foundation pledged $200,000 if they received 100,000 cranes. The response to the plea was momentous, and well over a million cranes from all 50 states and over 38 countries were received, and over $500,00 was raised.
At our school Emma Bogush and Maddie Baker led the effort, and in a short period of time, students at our school made and sent in over 300 cranes.
It has been nearly a year, and I got a wonderful newsletter from studentsrebuild.org. They provided an update on the reconstruction progress in Japan as well as a wonderful video showcasing the art installations that have been created with the million cranes received. Enjoy.
There are many ways for our students to get involved and help out others. I suggest you check out the website at http://studentsrebuild.org/ for more details.
We have so many talented students at our school. I do hope some of you will enter the Doodle for Google Contest for 2012. This year's contest theme is, "If I could travel in time, I'd visit..." -Would you maybe travel back to medieval Japan or China or Africa - places the 8th grade curriculum has been exploring?
Would you like to go back in time to ancient Greece -or maybe ahead in time to the year 2050? It's all up to your imagination. Along with your drawing, you'll need to submit your written response in 50 words or less.
(Deadline is Monday, March 19, so I can mail the entries in order to reach Google by March 23, at 11:59 pm Pacific time.)
Just to whet your appetite, watch this video about Matteo Lopez, the grand-prize winner for the 2011 Doodle for Google contest:
While your parents can submit your doodle, I would be honored to submit any entries for our school. You will need to submit a signed parent permission form along with your drawing. This year will be even more exciting in that there will be a winner for every state instead of just a number of regions, as was the case in previous years. In fact, there will be 250 state finalists chosen, so your odds of being recognized are higher than ever.
The grade categories are different this year, also. For our purposes 7th and 8th graders will be in different categories.
The doodles must be submitted on the second page of the official entry form, and only one doodle per student is allowed, although I may submit as many doodles per school as received.
There is also a way students can created their doodle in PhotoShop. I will have a template prepared and stored in the student drive for any student wishing to do an electronic doodle.
Come to see me in Lab 21 for an official entry form or to set up a time that you can work on your doodle on the school computers if you choose to use PhotoShop for a digital drawing.
Here are some entries from years past:
Dan
Sophie
Jeremy
Mary
So see me in Lab 21 soon - and start creating. If you are the grand prize winner, you can win a $30,000 scholarship for college as well as a $50,000 technology grand for our school! That would be awesome!
Thanks to the efforts of our 7th grade social studies teachers, Ms. Manzelli and Ms. Medla, students have been involved in many cross-team activities. One of Ms. Manzelli’s students had actually visited the African nation of Rwanda, and Ms. Manzelli arranged a visit from Andre’s father so their experience could be shared with the classes.
On January 5, 2012, Dr. Andre Sofair and his son addressed both 7th grade teams on the topic of the presenters’ recent trip to Rwanda. Of course, one of the highlights of the presentation was the viewing of pictures of the gorillas that have a habitat in Rwanda. However, during the presentation, Dr. Sofair and Andre also told the students about their visit to Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Kigali (CHUK) where great strides have been made in increasing the wellness of the children of Rwanda. Students’ interest in helping the clinic by running a fundraiser prompted a follow-up visit.
On Tuesday, January 24, Dr. Sofair returned to visit with the social studies classes. He was joined by Dr. Emmanuel Kamanzi, of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Kigali (CHUK) in Rwanda.
Dr. Kamanzi discussed with students his education, experiences, and daily life as a medical doctor in Rwanda. It was so gratifying to hear him explain how he chose pediatrics as his specialty. Dr. Kamanzi told of how very ill infants and young children would be brought to the clinic, but as a result of treatment available, most children would be greatly improved within a few days, laughing and playing; it was like a miracle. These successes so affected Dr. Kamanzi emotionally that he just knew that helping young children was his life’s mission.
Students greatly enjoyed the presentation and did indeed hold a fundraiser for CHUK. Hopefully, the generous donations of students and teachers at BMS will help to, in the words of Ms. Manzelli, “Help the children of Rwanda see a brighter and healthier future!” Just in – The seventh graders raised over $250 for the clinic in just four days.
We hope to stay in touch with Dr. Kamanzi through email even after his return to Rwanda.
As I walked by Ms. Manzelli's classroom this afternoon, I noticed a lot of engaged students busy with an activity, so I stopped in for a moment. The students had created wonderful projects as an activity tying in with their study of Ancient Egypt. What was so great was how they were moving in rotations from one project to another, viewing the project, and critiquing each one.This helped them to really focus on other students' projects as well as their own - a collaborative activity. I asked Ms. Manzelli to write a blurb about the project, and this is what she said:
" Seventh graders on the Blue Team have been studying Ancient Egyptian culture, government, and history. As a culminating project, students were asked to create a model project which illustrated in 3D an aspect of ancient Egyptian life. Students brought in items ranging from a diorama of the Nile River Valley to the interior of King Tut’s tomb, to a bust statue of Queen Nefertiti. At their “Ancient Egypt Fair,” students rotated among projects, constructively evaluating their peers’ work and commenting on the strengths and weaknesses of other projects. In addition, the class period ended with a short discussion on the structures, people, and geography that shaped the lives of ancient Egyptians more than 3000 years ago." There were many wonderful projects produced. Enjoy the pictures that Mrs. Manzelli captured with her iPad -I was only able to include a few in this post, but she has archived them for posterity in a folder at school. So - long after the projects have been thrown away, there will be a visual record of them. I encourage all of you to document your children's work. You never know when it might come in handy.
The Life Arts Team sponsored a field trip to Sleeping Giant State Park in the fall of 2010 for all 7th graders. Mrs. Vescovi and some students captured video clips to commenmorate the day. She returned the flip camera with the video clips to me, and I'm embarrassed to say that I didn't get time to work with them until the fall of 2011. Last year we had a lot of problems trying to edit video using Windows Movie Maker. The computers had been upgraded such that we were running Windows 7 on top of the old XP operating system. Most everything worked great except for Windows Movie Maker Live, the version that came with Windows 7. Unfortunately, almost every time we'd get a project started, it would crash and all the work would be lost.
I am very pleased to announce that editing the video clips on the brand new computers in Lab 21 with native Windows 7 operating system and using Windows Live Movie Maker worked like a charm. It still took a lot of time for me to watch all the clips,edit them, put in transitions and titles, and render the final product, but it was worth it, and it went seamlessly. I look forward to working with the students this year as they produce their own videos to enhance curricular projects.
Enjoy the trip to Sleeping Giant:
Here is another blog post that is out of sequence. Last June, as you'll recall, we had many snow days to make up, and the teachers were in session for three days after the students were finished for the school year 2010~2011. In those remaining three days, the teachers were engaged in a number of professional development activities. The middle school teachers from both Bethany and Orange gathered at Orange Middle School for a day of sharing. While every teacher in the district has wonderful projects to share, time allowed for a select few to present, and there is a quick slide of each of the presenters in this video clip.
I have been wanting to try Animoto - a web 2.0 tool that allows you to upload a number of pictures, select music, and add text, and then the tool puts it all together for you. The free version is limited to a 30-second video, but there are pay options that allow you more features. The next step up from free is available for $5.00 per month or $30.00 per year. That's not too steep a price if you want to produce a number of these videos. You can save them to your computer, email them, share them on Facebook, etc. I requested the embed code and am pasting it into this blog post, so I can share this with you. I hope you enjoy it.
This post is a little out of order,but I wanted to include this cool activity that Mrs. Frank sponsored for our students here at BMS. You can see in the video below what a wonderful time the kids had. Except for a few sugar highs, the kids were extremely well-behaved, and they all participated in clean up which made Mrs. Frank very happy.
The iPad was used to capture the video clips, and then the iMovie app for the iPad was used to combine the clips and add the transitions and titles. Enjoy!
Inspired by the children's book The Quilt Maker's Gift by Jeff Brumbeau, Mrs. Saisa (literacy enrichment teacher) and Mrs. Mahon (health teacher) paired up with students in their classes to create quilts and pillows to be donated to the Yale New Haven Pediatric Center. Mrs. Saisa, for a second year in a row, has spearheaded this project along with teachers and students from Bethany Community School. This community outreach project which emphasizes the importance of giving to others, is a real labor of love. Mrs. Saisa and Mrs. Mahon, with generous contributions from students and staff at Bethany Middle School, spend a great deal of personal time gathering materials and organizing this wonderful service project. This year the project generated 23 pillows, 51 pillow cases, and 89 fleece blankets which will definitely bring joy to the children who receive them. I could not include all of the photos in this post, but the ones included will give you an insight into how much joy the project also brought to the creators.
I am cross-posting this entry from the entry I made on the DEN blog for CT. Some students at my middle school had been asked to create a collage of family members as part of their Spanish unit on vocabulary having to do with the family. When they asked for help in printing their collage, I discovered they had created it on their iPads using a free app called Pic Collage. After downloading the free app, they were able to select a background and then add pictures from their pictures library, live shots from the camera, or pictures from a Facebook account. Once the pictures were added, they were easily able to size, rotate, and send them to the back or in front of other pictures in the collage. There were even simple editing tools for brightness, contrast, effects, etc. Once they were satisfied with their layout they had a number of options such as saving their masterpiece to their picture library, or uploading it to Twitter or Facebook, or emailing it to someone. Since they needed to print it out, they had mailed it to themselves at our school Google domain. Once the email was opened, the picture appeared. To facilitate printing, I had them right-click on the photo and save it to their network folder. They then opened it using Windows picture viewer – chose a size- and printed it to the color printer. The collages came out really nice. I am sure that app will be used for lots of school projects from capturing events during field trips to photographing student artwork displayed around the building and putting it together in a nice collage. Inspired by the students, I created the collage show here using pictures I’d captured on my iPad at the Westchester Day of Discovery in White Plains, New York. Hall Davidson was the keynote speaker, but I also got shots of Cindy, Max, Whitney, and Leslie.
I feel so bad for all those families in Bethany who had their power knocked out as a result of the freak nor'easter that hit New England this past Saturday, October 29. Because all of Bethany is without power, we have not been able to hold classes. Hopefully, power will be restored soon, and our family of learners -students, teachers, administrators, and staff- will be back and raring to go.
I imagine we will still have the judging of the best decorated lockers for Halloween. One of the students in Mrs. Habersang's Student Council group made a great poster advertising the contest.
Judging was supposed to take place on Friday, but it was changed at the last minute to Monday. Little did we know what lay in store for us.
When I left on Friday, I thought about touring around the school with my camera, but I decided to wait until Monday since some students were not finished. Little did I know that we'd not be in school on Halloween or the day after or the day after that. I did get one locker and some shots of teacher's doors, however.
Mrs. Mahon's Room
Mrs. Huitt's Room
Mrs. Kazdan's Room
I also did a poster for my door -using multiple layers in Photoshop. I think it came out pretty neat:
Finally, when I left school on Friday afternoon, I took one last picture of our fantastic, spooky tree at the end of the parking lot. It was hard to shoot because the sun was behind it, nearly blinding me. Who knew that 24 hours later, it would be covered with snow! I wish I had a picture of that!
So - a belated Happy Halloween to all. Here's hoping we'll have an easy winter - and very few snow days!!!!
