#kid smart

Moton Charter School

3rd Grade

Ms Simmons & Ms Chambliss

Students in Ms Simmons' and Mr Glazebrook's 3rd grade science class at Moton Charter School utilized the Generate-Sort-Connect-Extend thinking routine at the beginning of their planning process as they begin preparing to film a documentary about their science learning for the semester. In this thinking routine, students first generate as much information as they can within a large umbrella subject (in this case, "Science From This Quarter") on their own. Then we work together as a class to begin sorting that thinking into the beginnings of a concept map. As we sort student thinking, certain trends begin to emerge as connections arise between concepts that students have generated. Once we have established a few connections, students are encouraged to extend their thinking into new areas they are curious about or would like to explore further.

In this instance, you can see that many students connected to their unit on magnets and discovered connections within what magnets do. Students further built their connections between magnets and the idea of a science "experiment" and ended up extending their thinking into what they'd be curious to find out. We ended up with questions like "Does gravity affect magnets?", "Can you find out if something is metal using a magnet?", and "If I put my hand between a magnet and a piece of metal, will the magnet still stick?".

KID smART Artist of the Month March 2019 Congratulations to our Artist of the Month, Lola S.!

Lola has been selected among 3,000 KID smART students for this recognition. She is a 1st grader at International School of Louisiana - Dixon, where she is learning science through dance.

Ms. Jalisa, the KID smART teaching artist at ISL - Dixon, says, “Lola has blossomed since we’ve started doing movement. She uses her voice much more in class, and has gotten more confident in her answers, even if she makes a mistake! She always tries her best.”

KID smART Artist of the Month February 2019 Congratulations to our Artist of the Month, Lauren L.!

Lauren has been selected among 2,500 KID smART students for this recognition. She is a 4th grader at Hynes Charter School, where she is learning science through visual art.

Ms. Andrea, the KID smART teaching artist at Hynes, says “Lauren is consistently engaged, imaginative, innovative, and influential. Her presence in the classroom, or art studio during our time together, helps make it a joyful learning environment.”

KID smART Artist of the Month January 2019 Congratulations to our Artist of the Month, Ariah B.!

Ariah has been selected among 2,500 KID smART students for this recognition. She is a 4th grader at Martin Behrman Charter, where she is learning English Language Arts through drama/theatre.

Mr. Zeb, the KID smART teaching artist at Behrman, says “Ariah is extremely talented and smart.  She’s always willing to volunteer and share her ideas.” Ariah’s teacher, Ms. C. Mitchell, adds, “She’s an exceptional actor/artist due to her attention to details.”

I have spent my life learning to be a good collaborator. I create performance work together with groups of people including actors, dancers, visual artists, musicians, and writers.  As a director of devised work I facilitate collaborative processes with adults all the time.  When I work with people I know we use a process we have developed over the course of the past few years, but we also try all different things.  We sometimes talk about throwing cake at the wall and seeing what sticks; it’s not a clean process. Collaboration is messy; it means fights, and feelings sometimes getting hurt.  It means stepping back and trusting that the group knows the right direction, it means letting the story come organically instead of trying to force it. 

This year I have been working with Ms. Hoke, a third grade English teacher at Andrew Wilson Charter School in New Orleans, to devise radio dramas with her students.  The students have been working over a course of  ten weeks in groups of six to create an audio drama from scratch. They designed their setting as a group, created a storyboard as a group, choose music and sound effects as a group, and even wrote a script as a group.

I spent a lot of time talking about character voice, and how music can create mood and tone. Ms. Hoke taught the students about logical advance of events in a story.  We carefully scaffolded the creation process so that the writing would not overwhelm the students. But on day one problems started arising.  We asked the students to work in their groups to pick the setting of their story and draw it as a group on a huge piece of paper. We asked them to go around and share their ideas, and pick the one the group thought worked best. 

When we gave the signal to begin everyone started talking at once.  When the din subsided some people’s ideas had been put down and students were devastated that people weren’t listening to them, and frustrated that they had to go along with ideas they did not think were as good as theirs. Most groups were at a stalemate, fighting over what to draw instead of drawing. Ms. Hoke and I realized that we needed to scaffold more than the writing process if our students were going to be successful in the project. We were going to need to teach collaboration. I was terrified.  After all, I feel like I am still learning lessons about collaboration-- how was I going to teach it to my students?

Ms. Hoke and I started throwing cake at the wall.  We added extra steps to every lesson.  We made “compromise” a vocabulary word and talked about its meaning before every class.  We started talking about strategies that can help us come to a decision as a group, instead of just thinking that a group decision would happen.

Sometimes the results were beautiful.  One group in our first class of third graders decided to combine their ideas for a setting to come up with something better.  One eight-year old wanted to do a story set inside of Popeye’s (a fast food chicken joint), the other wanted to do a story set inside of an octopus.  They decided their final setting was an octopus inside of Popeye’s. I had to trust the process as much as they did so I let them go with it.  What came out at the end was a hilarious story about a group of people who go to Popeye's only to have the whole restaurant eaten whole by a very hungry (and very giant) octopus.  (You can listen to it at [email protected] if you want, it’s great.)

Sometimes things were still…messy.  Personality conflicts arose and I ended up routinely taking students out of the room to talk them through what to do when they felt like they were not being heard, or when they were having trouble listening.  I learned that I could coach a student through a rough spot individually, but that it was also important for them to learn the skill of stepping up to be heard when they needed to be heard, and stepping back when they needed to listen. It was okay that things got a little messy, as long as at the end of the day every student was proud of and invested in what they had made as a group.

This is the second in a four-part series illustrating the work happening at KID smArt in New Orleans, LA featuring both teaching artist and administrative voices. There's a new post every Monday this month. Read the first post in this series here and don’t forget to put ALT/space in your feed reader so you won’t miss a thing! —Malke Rosenfeld, ALT/space Editor

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Through the years that I have worked with KID smART and, especially in the last eight years, I have come to understand one truth that guides my work--the best use of our resources is investing in artists. 

As a program director and manager, I have always believed that decisions should be made by the people who will be living with the repercussions.  Since we started investing in training our artists and building their skills and capacities, I feel like this is truer than ever.  Our organization works in a transitional and complex environment. So much is different from school to school and classroom to classroom. Organizationally, we are driven by our flexibility and responsiveness to our individual schools and teachers and it is impossible to do that from behind an administrator’s desk. Our artists are our lifeline to the teachers and kids we serve and they know best what they need to do their job well and to make the work relevant and powerful for our schools

In New Orleans we have a fractured public school system.  Since Hurricane Katrina, our public school system has transformed into an almost exclusively charter system. Currently, over three-fourths of the 90 public schools in the city are charters and 84% of our students are enrolled in charter schools[i].  We have also seen a great influx of new, young classroom teachers coming through alternative certification programs such as Teach for America and TeachNOLA.  These teachers have passion and drive but sometimes lack the experience, tools, and knowledge of student culture that could make them truly effective. In the years after Katrina we found that often KID smART teaching artists were the most experienced educators in a school. 

We realized that we could help build the capacity of the classroom teachers with whom we worked. We started the Arts Experience in Schools (AXIS) program in partnership with local arts organizations to create an opportunity for classroom teachers to come together and learn arts integration strategy. We brought together teachers from around the city together with a consultant from out of state. These monthly sessions helped teach our teachers how to develop arts integration strategy in their own schools. 

After the first year we realized that our own team of artists, who were already working in residency in the schools, had the potential to lead these workshops just as  powerfully and with the added bonus of having already established relationships with the schools and teachers. 

We also realized that over the long run, paying for someone to train our artists in how to create and present workshops would not only build artist skill and earning potential, but cut that consultant budget by over 75%. We would have better trained, local artists leading workshops and being paid presenter fees and at the same time save the organization money by taking travel and hotels out of the budget.