Cool Schools #1

I've decided to start a new running series called "Cool Schools" after visiting one just outside of Salt Lake City, Utah.  My camera phone has been having issues so I apologize for some of these small, blurry ones.  I recommend if you are around to take a tour for yourself, though because it truly is a magical place.

Kauri Sue Hamilton School - Jordan School District

In this public school district, they received donated funds for the land and building, which left lots of funding to equip the school to it's optimal potential.  It is a K-12 school for profound and severely special needs children that are bused in from all over the district. 

I just kept thinking that "the least of these my children" had the "best that money could buy."  If I had a special needs child that qualified, I would buy a house in the district just for this school!

Here are some pics from my tour.

The cafeteria with full service kitchen and staff.

A sensory room for stimulation including colors, smells, lights and textures. 

Some of the equipment lining the halls including trampoline and wagons. 

The atrium for school gatherings.  These students in wheelchairs were preparing for the school show by doing a "dance" to The Little Mermaid songs.   

More equipment in the hallways including a variety of wheelchairs   

One of the "gym" rooms with a ball pit 

The speech therapists office which houses four therapists that go to the classrooms with mobile carts. 

The OT/PT lab 

A lab for fine motor skills and projects. Student practice sorting and other skills that might cross over to future jobs.   

The music room with music specialist and fully equipped instruments and stereo system.

Some book bags prepared by an eagle scout to check out 

The vocational lab where students can sort laundry and learn other trade skills 

The nurses clinic with five full time nurses on staff that visit the classrooms with medications.  There is also a medicaid office on the school site for parents.  

The laundry facility 

A library built through grant funds by my tour guide and student teacher with leveled texts to check out. 

A classroom with harness available for lifting children out of wheelchairs. 

Another classroom.  Everyone that I saw was open door and very friendly.  They all have baby gates to keep the "runners" from leaving the classroom. 

Each classroom also has a closet like this with full size refrigerator, a full size office and a wall of cabinets with microwave. 

All classrooms have a doc camera, a smart board, projector and microphone

The tub room with a sanitizing tub.

Here is one of the gyms.  

Another gym

The atrium from the ground floor

The doorway to the teachers lounge which was very nice!

One of the classrooms had a containment room for escalating violent behavior.  They never used it and stored balls in there.

Some of the amazing staff.  Here is a Teachers Assistant helping keep one of desks from tipping over with a rocking student.  The dress code there is functional for a lot of floor sitting.  

Hard to see but both these boys are strapped in to their desks with seatbelts. 

Some of the assistive technology equipment available.  These are push button, teacher recorded devices with the pledge, the schedule and Yes or No answer buttons.  

This student is in a contained chair that locks.  She called it the "hardrock desk"

This student is wearing leg braces and special shoes since one leg is shorter than the other.  These are equipped by the school.

The locker room with changing table and harness

The full size lap pool with handicapped beach entry

The hot tub with handicapped entry and harness.  Each class visits the pool once or twice a week.  

That's all for my first installment of Cool Schools!  I immediately called my speech teacher mother and told her I had just seen her dream school!  If you are ever in Utah....Go Visit!

So long Kauri Sue for now!

End of School for a First Grader

Here are some of the favorite take-a-ways from my daughter's last day of school.  

I love Steve Jenkins

Looking for a great nonfiction author?  Try Steve Jenkins.  He has some great stuff out there.  Here's his latest. 

"For the first few pages of this book, I felt REALLY slow. Steve Jenkins begins his book about time with a paragraph of information about the interval of time known as a second (an interval not related to any cycle in nature -- a human invention) and then pictures of animals or objects with a caption that tells how many of something they accomplish in a second. 20 hammers on a tree trunk for a woodpecker, 300 meters of a stoop (dive) for a peregrine falcon, Earth advances 18.5 miles in its orbit around the sun, a commercial jet covers 800 feet.

At the beginning of the pages about the minute, we learn that it, too, is a human invention, based on a Babylonian counting system. The hour we use, the one that divides day and night into twelve parts each, comes from the Egyptians. Days, weeks and months each get their own spreads of facts. They are based on cycles in nature.

Jenkins ends the book with a spread of "Very Quick" things -- things that happen in fractions of a second, like the trip a major league fastball makes to the plate (4/10 of a second), and a spread of "Very Long" things (in 2,000,000,000 years, the Earth's oceans will have boiled away).

Also in the ending are several graphics that I'd love to have as posters or handouts so that my students could look and  think and wonder and discuss the information presented graphically (no explanation or descriptive text): the history of the universe shown in a Fibonacci spiral, the Earth's human population in a stacked bar graph that shows the growth every 50 years by continent, a chart of life spans of a selection of plants and animals, and a timeline of this history of time and timekeeping."

http://readingyear.blogspot.com/ THURSDAY,NOVEMBER 10, 2011

Kadir Nelson's Latest Masterpiece

I've written before about this talented illustrator and can't wait to see his next work.  Here's a good article on his connection to history and how he goes about finding his story.




Three years later the dividend of that trust is Heart and Soul: The Story of American and African Americans(HarperCollins/Balzer + Bray, Aug.) which PW, in a starred review, called "a tremendous achievement." In the voice of a woman who's seen it all, Nelson takes readers from pre-Revolutionary War America all the way up to the election of President Barack Obama, recording the tragedies and the triumphs.   

"It's ironic," Nelson writes in his author's note. "History was not at all my favorite subject in school." And yet much of the acclaim that has come Nelson's way stems from his ability to powerfully illuminate the troubled existence of blacks in America—the perilous journey out of slavery in Henry's Freedom Box, written by Ellen Levine; the soul-stirring biography of Harriet Tubman in Carol Boston Weatherford's Moses; the indignities suffered by the men who played baseball just as well as white men but were paid a pittance because of the color of their skin in We Are the Ship.  "I had been telling the African-American story all along but I hadn't tried to tell it all in one place," Nelson says. 

Before We Are the Ship, he hadn't written the stories himself either. The success of that book, which won the Coretta Scott King Author Award and the Robert F. Seibert Medal (for nonfiction), gave him the confidence to try again, albeit on a much broader canvas. When Bray gave the green light, however, he remembers thinking, "Uh-oh. This is a big fine mess I have gotten myself into." Nelson confided his fears to a friend who confirmed them. "He said to me, ‘There's no way you can do that! It's too big! Do you know how many books you're going to have to read?' He was just saying what I had already said to myself." 

Nelson was determined, however. "Someone once asked me what my work was about and I said, ‘I am in hot pursuit of the truth.' History is a way to look for it. You get a general swath of it in school but that wasn't enough for me. I wanted to know the real story. And I had to begin with me. Find out more about my family, how they contributed not only to my life but to the life of our country." 

Nelson persevered through several attempts that were "not good," he says now. He showed his draft to his agent, Steven Malk at Writers House, "who said to me, ‘Well. There's some good things here.' "Nelson took his struggle to Ann Dieble, the designer who had worked with him on We Are the Ship, which is narrated by a (fictional) old-time veteran ballplayer. In Heart and Soul he had tried a similar device—but the voice was less a person than "an ancient spirit from across the ocean." According to Nelson, Dieble told him, "Make it a woman. Don't go so far back in time." 

"When she said that, I knew it was right. I immediately thought of my grandmother," Nelson says. His grandmother, Verlee Gunter-Moore, had inspired him before. A grocery store owner in Atlantic City, N.J., Gunter-Moore had muscular forearms from ripping up boxes by hand and shelving products. Nelson had used her as a model for Moses, as a "cuter version" of the powerfully built Harriet Tubman. 

He also relied on family for research, interviewing siblings, his parents, aunts and uncles, his grandmother. He remembered a story his Aunt Elaine had once told him about the last member of their family to have been a slave. He prohibited the serving of black-eyed peas on New Year's Day, a Southern tradition thought to bring good luck, because when he was a boy, the black-eyed peas were poured into a horse trough on New Year's Day for the slaves on the plantation to eat like animals. "After he was freed, he vowed neither he nor any of his families would ever eat black-eyed peas on New Year's Day again," Nelson says.  

...

"I think his work is more emotionally charged than anybody else's I've come across because he feels these subjects completely," Bray says. "So many of his portraits are composed so that the subject is looking directly at you. You feel so drawn in, like he's gotten inside these people. I think the reason for that is Kadir has not only passion for the subjects but compassion. He is moved by these stories and wants other people to feel the same." 

Yes, Nelson says, he could choose lighter or easier subjects at this point in his career, but he feels drawn to take on subjects worthy of his considerable—and he would humbly say—natural-born talent. His next project is a picture-book biography of Nelson Mandela for Katherine Tegen Books at HarperCollins, for fall 2012. 

"Some people don't discover what their gift is for a long time but mine was apparent from a very young age and I am cognizant of that and respectful and grateful," Nelson says. "It took a long time for me to figure out not to get in the way of it, that it's not really mine, it just comes through me. The only important thing about the work now is that I do whatever it is that is on my heart."

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/48018-kadir-nelson-the-accidental-historian.html?utm_source=Publishers+Weekly%27s+Children%27s+Bookshelf&utm_campaign=67c2ccea69-UA-15906914-1&utm_medium=email

Schools for Military Children

This article on military schools was very insightful though filled with opinion.  My recollection of schools on the many bases and posts I've lived on can relate.  Let's put some tax dollars towards this initiative!

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/06/26/military-children-s-schools-in-disrepair.html