The Kennedy School is so lucky to have Lindsey Tosches. For the last three years, Ms. Tosches has taught sixth grade at the Kennedy. This year, she continues to teach sixth grade science, but she also has a new role as our school's STEAM/Innovation Learning Specialist. She works with all grade levels on a weekly basis to incorporate STEAM into the curriculum. Now, as an ELA/Social Studies teacher, I've always found it a little more challenging to incorporate STEAM into my lessons and units in an authentic, beneficial way. There are so many ideas out there of how to do it, but I just haven't felt confident in implementing them. And in reality, STEAM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Mathematics-- Science and Math are literally part of the name! So when Ms. Tosches took on this new role, I viewed it as an opportunity to seek some guidance in how to apply the STEAM approach to my subject areas. She began the year in Mrs. O'Keefe's room, and this past week it was my turn to benefit from Ms. Tosches's expertise. Right now our focus in ELA is on character traits, and using evidence from texts to support those traits. After sharing this focus with Ms. Tosches, she found a way to integrate character traits with stop motion animation. The kids read a story called The Junkyard Wonders by Patricia Polacco. After digging into the story's characters, students were grouped in twos and assigned one of the characters from the text. Their goal was to identify at least two traits to describe their character and explain their thinking using specific evidence from the story. On Friday, my homeroom selected one of the traits to illustrate using the character's actions and words in a scene from the text. They created the characters and props for the scene with pipe cleaners and paper, and physically manipulated those materials in small increments while taking pictures with an iPad. When the series of frames are played back as a fast sequence, it will create an illusion of movement. They'll have a video displaying their character's actions, which represents the trait that they came up with for their character. Pretty cool, huh? Mrs. O'Keefe's homeroom will get started on this project tomorrow, and both classes will complete it by the end of the week. I can't wait to see the finish products!

Our Bucket Fillers of the week were Braedyn and Emma. I love how much Braedyn participates. He is always raising his hand and putting himself out there, and he's very kind, patient, and positive. He is just an all-around great kid. Emma is fabulous. Her love for reading and writing is a dream come true for an ELA teacher like me. She makes me smile on a daily basis with her creativity, wit, and insight. I'm loving being her teacher!