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Three teachers at Woodruff Middle School have been awarded EIA Competitive Teacher Grants. These grants support improvement of classroom instructional practices and procedures and provide funds that assist teachers in implementing the South Carolina curriculum standards, devising innovative teaching strategies, expanding the use of technology to enhance instruction, and implementing techniques for motivating and rewarding achievement.
Mrs. Tammy Bailey, seventh grade English Language Arts teacher, Mrs. Cassandra Barksdale, seventh grade math teacher, and Mrs. Carolyn Huckeba, exploratory computer teacher, were awarded a $6000 team grant for their proposal entitled “Connections with Math and Writing.”
The English Language Arts focus will be on different genres, or types, of writing such as narrative, expository, descriptive, and letters. The first graders will be publishing their writing in Bare Books. Art work will also be included to illustrate their writing.
Their team of students will be visiting two first grade classes at Woodruff Primary School once every month. These seventh grade students will be reading picture books to the first graders. These books cover math skills that are related to first and seventh grade South Carolina curriculum standards.
After reading the picture books, the seventh grade students will be working with the first graders on skills such as: recognizing shapes, finding patterns, and collecting and displaying data. The strategies taught will correlate to first grade standards as well as seventh and eighth grade standards.
The seventh grade students will create a scrapbook page of each visit using digital images taken by Mrs. Barksdale. On each page they create, the students will write about the visit. Every seventh grade student will create a scrapbook to present to their “first grade buddy” at the end of the year. They will also make one to keep for themselves.
Mrs. Huckeba will be overseeing the technology needed to create a PowerPoint presentation using the digital images taken by Mrs. Barksdale. A disc will also be created and presented to all the student participants during a culminating ceremony near the end of the school year.
