Millstone Township Middle School sixth-grader Roman Hillis, 12, studies a chicken skeleton in science class on Nov. 24. The Millstone Township Foundation for Educational Excellence provided a grant to purchase the specimen for the class. JEFF GRANIT staff MILLSTONE — This year, the Millstone Foundation for Educational Excellence (MTFEE) has awarded a total of $17,430.13 to township schools. These awards are currently being implemented by teachers and used by students.
The following awards were granted by the nonprofit MTFEE:
• E-Professional Library (pre-K through eighth – Laura Vetere)— Online library that provides administrators and teachers with relevant information they can use to improve instruction, participate in professional learning communities and increase pedagogy.
• Bumper Bowling (Primary, special needs – Yvonne Warschawski) — Offers a simple way to bring socialization to a group of special needs children.
• Smart Stations (Primary, kindergarten – Traci Soriano/ Faith Miller) — These materials create literacy, math and science centers for kindergarten classes to help students develop “hands on” skills, learn independence, self-monitoring and problem solving.
• Redefining Text (Middle, eighth – Kathryn McKenna) — With four “flip” digital video cameras, students can develop journalistic pursuits and dramatic interpretations of stories.
• Fine Feathered Fossils (Middle, sixth – Beth Topinka) — Online course allows sixth-grade science teachers to teach reallife skills employed by today’s paleontologists and evolutionary biologists. Students can also examine high-quality model skeletons of an advanced non-avian dinosaur and a modern bird, comparing features to discover connections regarding their evolutionary relationship.
• Hearing Before Learning (Primary, first-grade teachers) — Provides each first-grade classroom with an FM amplification system. “The students and teachers both continue to benefit from the uniform sound that they provide throughout the room,” said the first- and second-grade teams. This helps students hear and process the information given by the teacher and to distinguish between phonetic sounds
Curriculum director Laura Vetere explained that the E-professional library consists of more than 50 ASCD (Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development) books on educational topics.
“It provides resources for teachers to use to assist in their professional development and enhance their instruction in order to increase student achievement,” according to Vetere. “Teachers may access these books from any computer with Internet access. They can do searches on specific topics, print out any pages they want, as well as bookmark pages. Administrators have used the books for book studies with staff members and to research pedagogy they are using with their staff.”
She added that it provides the district with an affordable means for purchasing books. In the past, the cost per book limited how many could be purchased.
“With the E-library, every staff member has access to every book. Additionally, for $100, we can renew the books each year. The company will be expanding the number of books available,” she said.
According to sixth-grade science teacher Beth Topinka, her Fine-Feathered Fossils project was inspired by several articles she read about the discovery of feathered dinosaur fossils in China. “Students are naturally fascinated by dinosaurs and learn about them in previous grade levels, so this is a natural subject to build upon when teaching evolutionary theory and the relatedness of species,” Topinka explained.
She applied for the Fine Feathered Fossils grant so she could acquire essential background knowledge about the topic through a course run by the American Museum of Natural History.
She added that the MTFEE grant funding also provided a key resource book and two high-quality skeleton models — a velociraptor and a chicken. “Scientists have proven definitively that modern-day birds are the direct descendants of dinosaurs and I want my students to discover this for themselves, so I am preparing a series of lessons and labs where students will examine homologous structures in the chicken and velociraptor models. They have been eyeing the skeleton models with great curiosity since the start of the school year and I know they will be highly engaged in learning about this topic,” she said.