Geography-Board Games
Students in Mr. Breedlove's Geography class created board games as a final project. Students based their games off of a geographical region and created all elements of the game including the game board, game pieces, rules and game cards. Students began by playing games from the library's collection of board games. They finished the project by playing their own game and then rotating through the games of the their classmates and evaluating their creations. Some students even learned about 3D design and printing in order to create their own game pieces and design elements!
Earth/Space Presentations
Students in Mr. Ocon's Earth/Space Science classes created presentations with visual aids and informational materials. The students then presented to students from social studies and consumer science classes where students could vote for their favorite presentations. The competition made the presentations really fun as students battled to earn votes!
Students in Ms. Salimbene's Sociology classes completed their final competition of the semester playing BreakOut EDU. Despite our best efforts, the game turned out to be really hard! All the teams eventually broke out to earn themselves a sweet treat.
Reflecting on the Year
In the BVN Library, we continue to focus on student learning and the importance of students being able to think for themselves, access and analyze information, and make their own informed opinions. However, I feel that much more of our time this year is spent on intervention rather than instruction. This is an important shift and we now take care of a lot of the fundamental needs of students daily (food, water, shelter), but also the needs of connection, safety, and even self-actualization. So even though we know when our students have learned, based on assessments of their work (grading annotated bibs and research papers), we are no longer able to help them actually do the teaching. So this is another shift.
Our reflection on this year really focuses on the needs that we know we meet every day, versus the needs that decision makers think they know about our roles. We know we do a good job teaching students to think for themselves and are proud of that. We know they are prepared to write research papers in college for those that will need to (although not as well prepared as in the past). But we cannot compare our current effectiveness with a fully staffed library. However, there were so many successes this year, as seen in each monthly report and students continue to be better and do better because of our program.