September 2023 Grant Recipients

Our school is participating in a school-wide positive behavior support this year. If students have all assignments turned in, passing grades, and are within measurable behavior parameters they are able to choose a project class to attend each quarter.

The project class I will be hosting is poultry farming. Students will study agriculture through hands-on activities with quail. Quail was specifically chosen because their time lapse from hatch date to sexual maturity is only six weeks. Students will collect eggs from adult birds, incubate them, brood chicks, and then study the poults until they lay eggs of their own.

Aside from the excitement of learning how to ethically and safely handle stock, students will study lifecycles, best practices, market outlooks, and profitability in the agriculture sector. Students must then apply this knowledge using critical thinking and discovery to various formative and summative assessments to check for learning.

For the past twenty-five years as an early childhood educator, I have followed the study and use of one of the most important skills for a child in learning to read. This skill is phonemic awareness, or the ability to manipulate and distinguish the sounds in words. Children who have not acquired this skill struggle to decode words as they read. Dr. Marilyn Jager Adams is one of the top scientists in this area and she states: "the two best predictors of early reading success are alphabet recognition and phonemic awareness. This topic is part of the Dyslexia training required by the state of Idaho this year. The articles we read for this training were heavily related to phonemic awareness.

I have seen many children thrive and excel in reading by having this skill, so our early childhood team needs to have a project that will reach more students. In order to do this, the classroom needs to be framed in a way to teach this skill with interactive lessons and games.