That's a RAPP
10/30/2018
Over 1000 hours of time from 41 volunteers along with generous in-kind donations from the community amounted to almost $58,000! Wow! PNA 8th Graders have much to celebrate! The Pacific Northern Academy Ruth Arcand Park Project (PNA RAPP) has reached its peak. All obstacles for the course have been installed and the surrounding trail has been improved. This amount more than doubled the $20,000 matching grant PNA 8th graders received almost two years ago from the Anchorage Park Foundation for their park design idea. And, this project still has around $4,000 to spend on the project! Next Steps: Youth Employment Program (YEP) will work to break a trail from Lake Otis to PNA’s developed section of trail, granting access to Ruth Arcand Park from the west side of Lake Otis. PNA 8th graders also plan to design, create, and install signage to the area of Ruth Arcand Park before the end of the school year. It is the hope of the PNA Middle School that the obstacle addition and continued trail improvement will be maintained and upgraded by PNA for as long as it is located in this area. This week, 8th graders were able to share their hard work and efforts with Kindergarten through Middle School. WIth 7th grade students leading small groups, all students walked out to the park site, learned about the project, and got to try out the course for the first time. It seemed like everyone had a great time! Enjoy the photos of the journey and the celebration! Writing Workshop
10/19/2018
Lucy Calkins, an icon in the teaching world for the English language arts, has breathed new life into Middle School’s Writing Workshop. This year we adopted her well practiced curriculum and are already seeing fabulous results! The first unit eighth graders are working on is investigative journalism. First, they learned how to be good observers to capture an event and write out what they witnessed in a “newscast”. Once they had practiced recording the 5 W’s (Who, When, What, Where, and Why), they learned to tell the story based off of the newscast event. Students discovered that what they witness may just be the “tip of the iceberg” when it comes to finding out the whole story. See their first journal below. Currently, these students are working on writing stories about issues they are passionate about. Their stories will involve interviewing, researching, and planning. Stay tuned for their next journal in the coming weeks! Our 6th/7th grade class has been working on writing powerful personal narratives. By studying published authors' narrative techniques and studying other middle schoolers' work, they've worked their way through two solid narratives and are ready to revise one of them into a polished final piece. We've worked on finding small moments that can be developed into interesting narratives; trying out various leads; slowing down the action to help the reader experience the event; using inner dialogue and backstory to tell a "real" story, or lessons learned; and will play around with powerful endings next week. Our writing work extended into Social Studies as well as students researched a topic of interest in our study of early US history. Students used a published Kids Discover magazine as a model and developed their own versions. We learned some important lessons about revision when we met in small groups to apply a "critical friends" protocol: providing positive feedback as well as suggestions for improvement. Next week promises to be a week of heavy revision: re- VIEWING their work with an eye toward improvement! We look forward to sharing our final work with all of you! PBL @ PNA
10/6/2018
One of the hardest things about Project Based Learning for teachers is authenticity. This topic was discussed at our most recent faculty meeting. Teachers struggle over the idea of handing students a contrived problem as the premise for a project because they know that if the idea comes from the students, there is much more buy-in. However, teachers also know that they are expected to make sure that students are reaching performance expectations through their academic subjects, so, often, contrived projects are the best way to ensure they can.
Typically, Project Based Learning requires careful planning. By starting at the end goal, teachers backward plan integrating as many subjects as they can. But sometimes, time does not allow for that when opportunities for “spontaneous projects” arise. Such was the case with the recent Utensil Drive by 8th graders. The unexpected “entry event” was the Back to School BBQ. Wait, that might not be right. The unexpected “entry event” may have actually been the Spring Trip to Costa Rica where this group of students patrolled beaches in the middle of the night to help leatherback turtles by safely collecting turtle eggs as they were laid so that poachers would not take them. At this Turtle Station, students learned all about the different sea turtles and how poachers and plastic contribute to sea turtles’ dwindling numbers. Students were left with a very purposeful take away about how they could personally contribute to improving the health of the environment. Back to the BBQ. When students saw the plastic utensils being disposed in the garbage, their thoughts went back to what they had learned in Costa Rica and they wondered if there was a way for PNA to change this practice. Make way for Spontaneous Project Based Learning! So, students
Aside from the original written letter, everything happened within four school days. This is an example of a truly authentic project - one that students were able to find a tangible purpose for. They had to use their academic knowledge of writing, speaking, language, and science to pull this off as well as the 21st Century Skills of critical thinking, collaboration, communication, information literacy, flexibility, leadership, initiative, and productivity. Teachers cannot expect to always have truly authentic projects fall in their laps like this one. But when they do, at PNA we are grateful to have the ability to drop everything and honor our students’ desires. One more reason PBL works at PNA. |
Sarah Mariner
Ms. Mariner earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Biological Science from Colorado State University, and was awarded a teaching certificate through the University of Alaska, Southeast. Her varied background includes being an environmental education field instructor in Massachusetts, Colorado, and Baja, Mexico. She also served two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Dominican Republic. Archives
April 2021
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