This week we are thankful for 86%

This week's Presenter's Club meeting followed a great program with a very different group, Longley Elementary from Lewiston. This school has a diverse group of students from Sudan, Africa, Morocco, and Asia - just to name a few. I had a great discussion with the teacher about the challenges that she faces in the classroom; cultural differences, non-English speaking students, wide range of academic abilities, low economic backgrounds, and non-existant parent support goups. She really enjoys bringing her students for the LabVenture! program, because it is something that they can all participate in on some level. A cultural difference that she noted was that many of her students aren't hands-on and see animals as being wild, not something that can be handled...including our X-Fish.

As a group we discussed ways that we could alter our presentation style to better engage ESL students, such as speaking slowly, shorter sentences, and simpler words.

This week we made some minimal changes to the 2hr presentation to include some more student artifacts, and discussed ways to engage teachers during LabVenture! through conversation and paritipating in the program at empty stations when we have smaller groups (testing out Lobsters was a possibility).

But we saw both of these topics; presentation changes and engaging teachers as a much bigger discussion, so they became topics for future weeks:

Presentation changes (likes/dislikes, new content, new styles, different ways of using powershow) is next week's topic of discussion (Dec 2nd during lunch).

Fostering teacher relationships will be another topic that we'll get to in December as well.

Wow...December already! Again, if you're interested, you are all more than welcome to contribute.

Happy Thanksgiving!!!