Everyone is a Contributor

A big part of creating world-class talent at Laurel Mountain is teaching our students about the importance of helping our community.  We accomplish this by making service learning and community service a part of what we do in our classrooms and during enrichment clusters.  An example of service learning in the classroom is when a class decides they want to have a food drive to help the hungry in the Austin community, after discussing problems our community faces during Social Studies. An example of community service in an enrichment cluster is our current 4th and 5th grade enrichment cluster, "Mission Kindness".  They currently working on spreading small acts of kindness throughout the school.

Another example of community service is part of what our 3rd graders do every year during Halloween.  The third graders learn about the non-profit organization UNICEF (The United Nations Children's Fund) and about how UNICEF helps kids from around the world.  Every year, UNICEF has a fundraiser campaign during Halloween where the students can decide to ask neighbors for spare change as they are trick-or-treating.  This year, our Laurel Mountain third graders collected $649.01. WOW!!!!

According to the Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF website (http://www.unicefusa.org/mission/usa/trick-or-treat), it costs only $1 to give a child clean water for 40 days.  It costs $10 to vaccinate 280 children. It costs $500 to install a water pump for a whole village. So imagine what UNICEF will be able to do with the money our students collected.

Laurel Mountain's mission statement says, "A school for talent development where everyone is a learner, teacher, decision-maker, and contributor." Teaching our students the importance of helping, not only the community around us, but the world around us shows our children that they can contribute to making the world a better place.  And as a teacher AND a parent, I cannot think of a better lesson for my child to learn.

I Love Candy...and Analytical Thinking.

As a kid, I loved Halloween.  I loved the dressing-up, pretending to be someone else (Wonder Woman) and I loved the candy!  But, I also loved when trick or treating was over.  I would come home, pour out my loot and sort it.  I would place all of the M&Ms in one pile, the 3 Musketeers in another pile, the Kit-Kat bars in another and so on.  I would count how many of each type of candy I received from my neighbors.  And of course, there was a little sampling of candy throughout this entire process.

This past weekend, I watched (with sentimental pride) as my own son did the exact same thing.  And then a thought hit me.  What a minute!  All of this categorizing and organizing...this is analytical thinking. This is Sybil the Scientist's type of thinking!

Now you may be asking "Who is Sybil the Scientist?"  Sybil is a friend from Crystal Pond Woods in the Primary Education Thinking Skills (PETS) lessons.  I teach our first, second, third and some fourth graders about Sybil and her analytical thinking.  We have been concentrating on analyitical thinking over the past two weeks in second grade.

Sybil the Scientist and analytical thinking are very logical.  Sybil is not creative and does not use her imagination.  Instead, Sybil observes the world around her using her five senses.  What is she looking for?  Attributes, of course.  Attri-what?  Attributes.

Attributes are the characteristics that everything in the world has. Attributes make things what they are.  Size, color, shape, texture, pattern, taste...these are all different types of attributes. In analytical thinking, the common attributes that things share are used to place them into groups.  In science, we call this classifying.

In the PETS story that I have shared with the second graders, Sybil taught Dudley the Detective how to classify his favorite building blocks.  He learned that that the blocks had the attributes of size, shape and color.  He used the attributes of small, square and red to classify the blocks into different groups.  Sybil also taught him to use a Venn Diagram to organize the blocks into these different groups.  In the end, Dudley was able to classify the blocks into eight different groups: 1) small, 2) red, 3) square, 4) small and square, 5) small and red, 6) red and square, 7) red, small, and square, and 8) not red, not small, and not square.  Also, the students learned that group #8 are called outliers because they do not fit into any of the categories.  I will save the Malcolm Gladwell book for another lesson.  :)

Who knew that I was training for my future of teaching analytical thinking when I was sorting candy as a kid?  Which must mean eating all of my child's candy as an adult should be helping me become a better teacher, right?

Teaching our students how they can use the different types of thinking helps make them better problem solvers.  And in the end, that creates the world-class talent that we have a Laurel Mountain.