001Mr. Eckie here. Mr. Grippa here. M here Rosenberg Mr. White. Thank you. Uh let's all stand for the pledge to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, liberty and justice for all. So, I'm excited to uh see what we have for hands-on science instruction at the elementary level. And I will turn it over to Miss Salano. Well, thank you, Miss Herrian. Super excited to showcase our two science teacher coaches who because of approval through the board of education budget last year, we were able to hire both Stephanie Lopez Smith and Stephanie Conungle. We are very excited to have them talk to you tonight about the program that they are running with fourth and fifth grade students across the district. um with
002your help and with the help of the Cheshire Ed Foundation, they started this year off with robotics instruction with robots for all of our students to use and they have delved into in the second semester aggracience. So I am going to turn it over to both of these wonderful women to bring you through what this this year has been like for our fourth and fifth graders. Hi. Hi everyone. Uh welcome to our robotics and agriculture debrief. Um, it's so wonderful to see everyone tonight. Um, I am Oh, I hope it doesn't go too far. I'm Stephanie Lopez Smith, as Marlene said. Um, this is my first year with Cheshire and it's great to see everyone. And I'm Stephanie Concus and this is also my first year with Cheshure. And uh, thank you for pushing up
003the meeting for me. So, uh, we'd like to walk you through just a little bit of our STEM lesson focus over the course of the year. In the fall, we implemented a robotics program with all fourth and fifth grade students across the district. And our aggracience program started in February and is continuing through April. And it focuses on uh the importance of land in agriculture. So we found this little quote that really resonated with us. Education is not about the learning of facts but the training of the mind to think. And this is really our our motto for kids is it's it's about how we can change how they're thinking in order to change how they're learning. All right. So when we were approached with robotics this year, we really wanted to make it um
004an engineering problem. We really thought about STEM. So we had to pose this scenario to students that would then lead into uh a problem that they were solving. So the scenario is to have a robot who's working at the school to move items that are too heavy and that it would be just too time consuming for uh teachers and administration maybe maintenance. It's just all a lot of work. So to save time, the students were asked right, how do we design a prototype of this two- wheeled robot that can carry uh material all around the campus, possibly even outside, right? That was going to travel on different terrains, um navigate different obstacles, and be user friendly for both teachers and staff. So the scenario was set. Here's our problem. The engineering problem allows students to
005navigate the process of engineering, right? And it's through this process again that they're able to define and focus on their question every day, identify the problem, and work together to walk through the brainstorming, the prototyping, the testing, and all the collaboration that comes into play when you're trying to solve for an engineer problem, right? Um, so we'd like to introduce you to a robot that fourth and fifth graders uh not only learned how to program but also had to build. These were kits that were purchased through True Robotics. And they came in little boxes with a bunch of different pieces and nuts and bolts and all different parts and a set of instructions. and they had to really work as a team in order to build their robot correctly in order for it to work
006correctly. So the build took about two days uh two class uh two 45minute class blocks and this is what the robot looked like when they were done building and working together in order to make that build happen. So there was a lot of trial and error in this build. Uh we had many students who would put something together and then they'd go to do something else and say, "Oh man, this doesn't fit." And so we would have to say, "Okay, well, let's go back to the instructions and figure it out." So it was a great engineering uh design process where they had to work together and they also had to backtrack to figure out uh what went wrong maybe in the build in order to solve it together. This is our true robotics playground. This
007is where students actually had to engage in the block coding process. There's lots of tasks that need to be done in this playground forum. You have a menu on the left hand side um that they would go through. We only worked in this 12 sessions with drive events and inputs. Um we gave them the basic foundation. If you look at this, it's the first three blocks. And then we explained all the other parameters that the robots were going to have to use in order to move efficiently. Um, in order for them to actually make this robot move, however, they still had to name the program, save the program, connect to their robot, upload their program, grab the robot, navigate that screen, and then run it. So, it was all very taskorientated, lots of patience, lots
008of trial and error, lots of I don't know why it's not working. It keeps spinning around in circles and then you'd go back to what was the foundation that we gave you to write this program. So, it was very interesting. So something we tried to resonate through both the robotics program and the aggra science program was this idea of three-dimensional learning. So of course we have our our engineering practice that students are doing but there's many crosscutting concepts that overlap with the engineering task that they're doing and there's a disciplinary core idea that goes along with it. So the idea is it's not necessarily what the students are learning, but how they're learning and the steps that they're taking to get there. So threedimensional learning is all about allowing students to actively engage in the
009engineering practices and many crosscutting concepts to deepen their understanding of a certain core idea in order to explain a phenomena or solve a problem. Like Stephanie was saying, our problem was to move supplies across imaginary supplies across a building uh from one point to another. All right. Inquiry, discovery, and robotics. I mean really there are so many key concepts, but we w just wanted to highlight some of them um that students engaged in throughout the program. If we look at inquirybased learning um that allowed students to learn meaningful questions that drive scientific inquiry right this idea of asking questions it leads deep to deeper investigations practical problem solving and real world contexts um I'd go through them all but we would be here for hours um and as we go through the presentation we'll explain
010more about what how they engaged in some of these concepts S. So, oh, oh, throughout the robotics program, students were given tasks that built upon one another so that they could create bigger coding projects like building pathways. We have a couple of videos, uh, short videos we wanted to share with you of the task that students were asked to do. This first video shows students programming a robot and successfully completing a pathway to mimic a pathway in the school to go from point A to point B uh to transport those imaginary uh supplies. So, let's take a look. Wait, give us technical. All right. This next video involved a different engineering task where they had to figure out how to program the ultrasonic sensor which senses objects. And if they did it successfully, the robot
011would avoid running into things and turn around and find a different path. And so let's take a look at that. Oh, come on. Olivia. So, if you notice, instead of running into the girl, it stopped and it turned around. And that's a huge programming success story. Um, it doesn't look like much on the video, but they went through a lot of programming in order to make that happen. So Steph had mentioned a lot of different concepts that we've embedded in the program. So we wanted to shed some light on a couple that students used a combination of science and engineering practices and concepts. So one idea was this idea of cause and effect. In order to see what happens to a robot when a change is made, we asked students to change the power level,
012time, angle within the program and actually take measurements of the robot to see what was that relationship of that change to si figure out what is going to happen to the robot if I make this one change. This also helped them observe patterns. So after making a couple of measurements of how far their robot went by changing these parameters, it was allow them to figure out a pattern in the programming by changing these. Including this investigation, we also had others that they carried out. They had to look at how maybe scaling back certain parameters affected their robot as well. So the programs to the right there are actually three different programs that we had the students run in which they changed the angle90 180 and -360 and they had to observe how the robot moved
013and by changing the scale of this angle they would have noticed that their robot moved to the left a little bit halfway in a full circle. So, this allowed them to complete the challenges that we gave them because it allowed them to see that pattern. One of my favorites was really looking at the structure and function of the robot. So, we had the students build the robots and as we progressed in our challenges, they often found out that something was wrong in their build through running a program. So after we had them build and move the robot for the first time, many students discovered that the robot went left when it should have went right or forward when it should have went backward. And the reason was there was these ports that wires plugged into.
014And if they didn't plug the port into the correct motor, then it made their robot do the opposite thing. So if that happened, we had to say, okay, let's go back to the drawing board. Let's figure out what's wrong. So thinking about how that structure of that robot affects that function. We also wanted to make sure that we were aligning with the state. So these are the next generation science standards. This particular science standards is asking students to define or design a problem. Right? I don't want to read it verbatim. I just want to list maybe some key components. Students were able to recognize a problem or opportunities for improvement. They def they define what a successful solution would look like within their design and what goals was must be met. They also considered considered
015criteria and constraints. That was just breaking down what our state standard is and making it completely accessible to our students, right? Because again, we have 12 days to focus on this problem. Along with having your um your performance expectation, we have the science and engineering practices and we have the crosscutting concepts. The three of these things, the your disciplinary core idea, your science and engineering practice and your crosscutting concepts, they make up your threedimensional learning. It's like you have a stool with three legs and the stool is standing strongly on those three legs. It's the foundation. So in the earlier grades, students start with basic inquiry and exploration. But as students move to grades three through five, they begin to ask more detailed questions and specific problems that can be solved with a design or
016a system. We chose robotics. Robotics combines science and engineering to create tools that address specific needs or problems. Robots are designed to perform tasks that would be difficult, dangerous, or time consuming for humans. When we start this program, we introduce students to a variety of different types of robots to make that realworld connection. Robots have a significant influence on industries like healthcare, manufacturing, and space exploration. So, robotics isn't just about technical skills. It fosters higher ordered thinking and assess essential social emotional skills. complex thinking is identified with students I'm sorry students are identifying problems and they're breaking them into smaller parts and they're analyzing programs to test them. If we think about the social emotional learning, Stephanie and I had so many experiences of well, we had to learn to take turns. That was really
017hard. Or um I had to wait. I had to be patient for my partners to finish running their program so I could run it. or I know that they don't know how to use that screwdriver and I have to wait because it's not my turn yet because they're supposed to be the builder right now. And it was this constant um perseverance that they had to go through every day. They had to share ideas with their peers that were sometimes shot down. You know, Johnny doesn't want to do the program that I wrote, right? Johnny says it's not going to work. Well, why? Right, they're presenting ideas and giving feedback 100% of the day. Like, it's just the way the class runs. And then I just listed other things like compromising, your hands-on learning, problem solving,
018uh, emotional regulation is the kicker. Fine motor skills, follow through, and of course, your perseverance and trial and error. Um, I'd like to go ahead and introduce one of our fourth grade teachers at Chapman Elementary who'd like to share what he experienced with his students as the program was being run. And I'll let him introduce himself. He's so wonderful to be here. Thank you. Hello. I'm Tanner. I'm a fourth grade teacher at Chapman. And yeah, I just wanted to come and share our experience uh my experience and my class's experience. We were one of the first classes uh we were part of that first rotation um back at the start of the year that got to experience the new STEM program and it was really just an awesome experience for everyone um myself and the
019students included. You know the the STEM program really made an incredible impact on uh my class from the very first day. They were super engaged. They were just wanted to be hands-on and that's what STEM is like. They were just really just diving right into everything. Um, the hands-on nature of the program allowed them to just get right to problem solving, coding, collaborating in ways that traditional lessons uh don't always replicate. Uh, one of the biggest takeaways with how they I was very surprised how they just really uh grasp the the blockbased coding that was part of this robot um program. They quickly were comfortable with sequencing. they were able to figure out how to program the robots to go forward, backwards. Um, eventually some students, one of the videos was of my students who
020with the sensors, they were able to figure that out, which was again kind of a next level thing um that they were able to work out a as they were working with the robots. The trial and error process was not frustrating for them. Um, it was something that they were more motivated by than getting frustrated from. They embraced the challenges that were presented before them and they showed persistence and critical thinking so that they could debug the codes that weren't working and to work together to find solutions. Beyond coding, the biggest thing about this program was the collaboration that it built within the students. They naturally took on different roles. They communicated their ideas to each other clearly and they supported each other uh in a way that made the learning process even more meaningful
021for each other. They weren't just coding. they were developing essential teamwork skills that was going to serve them well beyond the classroom. Uh, you know, I think that this program, as good as it was in the aggate science one, too. We're not talking about that one necessarily, but it was really cool and engaging for them. And this stuff just is so important for them, I feel like, because it not just doesn't just build them on how to program a robot, but it builds those other skills like that collaboration, that teamwork, these essential skills in their lives that um you know, they're going to need as they get older. And this STEM program really did a great job of helping foster that and is just something that I'm looking forward to continuing um next year and
022beyond. You know, overall this robotics program and the STEM right now is a huge success and I the impact on student learning was very clear to me. Um the excitement that it created in students, the perseverance that I saw, the collaboration that I saw, it just showed how powerful STEM can be for students and how it engages young minds and helps prepare them for the future. Thanks so much, Tanner. Just so everyone knows, Tanner was like the first teacher in my run of teachers who got to see everything firsthand. Nothing. I had not rolled this out to anybody. He saw all the bugs. His kids felt all of it. It was incredible. So, it was a good run. We have some student testimonials that we want to share with everyone. We'll go ahead and get
023that started. Thank you so much. We didn't bring any students here because we thought we can get more of their voices if we had a video of more of them. So, I hope you enjoy [Music] I like building the robot because I really like using tools. Probably the part where we got to program everything. Favorite part of robotics is programming. My favorite part of robotics was the building because my partner and my I will like just grade up different things. Like the building part. I liked like working with like partners and like learning something that I probably wouldn't have done probably like creating the programs, building the robot. My favorite part about robotics was probably the hallway task. One of the most challenging things was making our pathways cuz there was a lot of different
024angles trying to get like the code correct. probably not wanting to like take control and want to be the ones always being hands-on, but you had to be patient and work with the team. One of the most challenging things for me was coding the robot because it was hard for me to get the code I wanted right. Putting on the parts that like do something like not the screws, putting on like the cameras. I think it was like coding it cuz like you have to figure out um like how fast it has to go in order to reach this um specific spot that you want it to be in. probably working together as a group because we would all have to try and do different decisions and like we would have to agree on certain
025things. I think that was probably the hardest part. I was proud of doing a lot of things while I was programming but probably finishing something with my partner understanding like what to do like being able to build it and like code it by like myself. I was proud of when we finally made this square. Yeah. Programming of the robot, how good we worked as a team. We tried programming over and over and like we kept getting the programs wrong, but we also kept moving forward to the right answer. Probably making a triangle. Uh, nobody else could do that. And that's how I learned how to turn. uh being able to work as a team. It was hard at some point, but when we got it right the first time, my team was like so proud.
026Um the hardest part was probably putting it together. The hardest part was like like telling it to go like a certain direction and like a 360. At the beginning when we were building um we accidentally put the thing to hold up the bot backwards and then we had to unscrew it and fix it all taking it apart because it was kind of sad. One thing I would change is to learn about uh multiple types of robots. I would definitely make it longer. I I felt like we had a really short time there. if there were like different robots that we could build instead of everyone building the exact same robot. Customizability because there was like the same robot every single time. How long it was cuz I wish it were longer. We would work as
027a group, but we built our own individual robot so we could all see how it works. I want to learn how it could um sense things in its way and then it could just move out of it way. Something I would like to learn about robotics next year is like where did the robots come from? How did the force robot invented and stuff? If we had like an obstacle course to get the robot to go [Music] [Applause] [Music] through. I'm excited for agriculture cuz I really enjoy watching like the plants grow and seeing how it like goes cuz that's always fascinating to me. I think I'm just excited to try it out and try something new. Yeah, I'm really excited for that because we're going to get to do more with our team and we're
028going to come over more challenges as a team. It's like hands on so I'm excited to like do experience. I'm really excited for everything. I can't [Music] wait. And that is definitely our wrap on robotics. That's that's all we have. And we're going to just shift gears because the student experience wasn't over in STEM with robotics. We went on to agra science um really focusing on how does agriculture impact the land. So as we thought about growing minds and complex thinking, we wanted to make sure that students were engaging in the same types of concepts that we were able to deliver in robotics. So we were asking investigative questions, understanding cause and effect, problem solving, analyzing data, um modeling, decision making, and then one quote that resonated with with us was to forget how to
029dig the earth and tend to soil is to forget ourselves. Students definitely went on a journey through this agra science program. They discovered the meaning of agriculture and the everyday products that come from agriculture to support their daily lives. That's this beginning question. How does agriculture impact land? And then students begin to problematize everyday seeking answers to new questions. They're using different sources to discover farming practices and the effects they can have on the environment. What's in our soil? We did an investigation where they used soil as a system to figure out nutrients, soil health, um fertilizers. Then we went on to investigate practicing um using critical thinking skills to make connections to bigger farming practice concepts using inquiry and data collection and analysis. Of course, cause and effect with reasoning and collaboration with peers
030to discuss their findings. So, how does farming and irrigation and erosion impact soil movement runs into the very wrapup of the program? There's many lessons in between, but what are sustainable and unsustainable farm farming? Um, this allows students to dig deeper into farming practices and take a stance on whether they would prefer to use sustainable or unsustainable farming practice in their local communities. Um so it was quite quite the journey and this is how our our lessons linked to how does agriculture impact our land. So what we tried to do is to model some instructional practices for teachers in order to really drive home this spiraling curriculum of one lesson leading to another and the students figuring out the questions that they have and what they want to learn. So one important tool that we
031used was the idea of consensus discussions. So this is where we would host a class discussion with our students after a lesson or an experiment to talk about our data and try to come to an agreement on what our big takeaway and understanding was. So after the group reached consensus in data analysis or in our big ideas, we then added them to a class summary table. So, this was a great way for us to see the links between the lessons. It was helpful to students to say, "What did I learn last class?" Because we only saw students two out of four days. And so, sometimes we would go a couple days without seeing them. And it was a great way to have students remember, oh, I do remember saying that was my big learning from
032that lesson. And this really linked one lesson to another to really show that flow of the lessons. We also created questions as a class which ended up many of them being answered by a following lesson. So the students were creating their own learning with this learning tool. Um students analyzed and collected data in the experiments we ran. In this particular experiment, students were able to answer the question, what is soil erosion and why is soil erosion an important factors for farmers to think about? And they had seven different experiments that they ran. Um I think three were with plants, four was without plants. They all had different types of soil in them. Um, and they ran water through it and they had to collect that water and measure that water um, and take observations of
033that water to determine which bottle bottles were creating what kind of erosion. And do farmers have to think about that? Is choosing the proper soil important for a farmer to consider before planting his crops? So in addition to looking at class data analysis, we also had students using models to help explain their thinking. This is another experiment we ran where students added sand, clay, and lom to a cup with water and really shook it up and they let it settle and it surprised everyone that it doesn't stay like this mud pie milkshake. It makes these beautiful little layers and all of them do. and the students really have to think about, wow, I've really mixed this, but I'm seeing the layers. Where did that come from? So, through the use of uh discussion and modeling,
034they're able to try to figure that out. Uh making thinking visible. This learning strategy allows students to learn about the characteristics of sustainable and unsustainable farming practice. this particular lesson. Um, they made T-charts with the pros and cons and hung them up for everyone to learn about a particular practice. They were given different articles and kind of split in half as to, you know, maybe eight students had sustainable, eight students had unsustainable. They learned about the article. They learned about the practice. They wrote it on the chart paper. They hung it up for everybody to see. And then that particular group got to explain to the whole class about the practice they learned about. At the end of that particular lesson, they then had to take a stance as to whether they would like an
035unsustainable or a sustainable practice for a farmer to use in their community. Some of the practices we used were using uh pictures as like meaning phenomenons and having students talk about what they notice and wonder to promote engagement. And for many students, the idea of making a claim based on their observations was new to them. So, sentence starters were also given so they could uh get into that habit of how do I make a claim? How do I give evidence and how can I explain it with scientific reasoning? Word walls are a great tool in science classes and can be beneficial for students learning and understanding. Uh students can discover scientific words together. Um word walls help students comprehension and supports visual learning and that's why we have the pictures beside there. Word walls promote
036critical thinking by connecting between concepts and between science disciplines. So some of the words that they're learning and using in agrocience could possibly be used in another discipline. So just like our ro robotics curriculum, this is aligned to the next generation science standards. We used an earth science science standard uh to to uh plan our curriculum here. And the idea was that we were using human activities in agriculture in thinking about how everyday life can have major effects on specifically land. This was a huge standard and it was supposed to go into land, vegetation, oceans, air. Uh but since we only had 12 sessions with students, we focused on soil, which is why many of the experiments you saw were with dirt. And then again, thinking about how communities can choose a particular uh resource
037such as different farming methods to help protect Earth. And of course, we have our science and engineering practices and our crosscutting concepts. So, as I said, obtaining and combining information from different types of sources to to explain this problem of how does agriculture impact the land and all the other questions that link together throughout this lesson. Our crosscutting concepts were um a system can be described in terms of its components. Uh students were able to learn about soil systems, right? We have soil health, erosion, soil fertility. They learned a lot about water systems, irrigation. We touched on water conf conservation and human systems like farming, cultural practices. And that's how we tie together that three-dimensional learning for our agrocience STEM program. So, unfortunately, our meeting tonight over overlapped with elementary evening conferences, which is why
038we only had had Tanner here tonight. Thanks, Tanner. Uh, so we do have some quotes from other teachers who are at conferences right now. Uh, so we'll just read a couple of these to you uh from the teachers at Chester Public Schools. Jenna Divine, who's a fourth grade Highland teacher, said, "My students enjoyed the robotics program so much. The program was incredibly engaging for them. The hands-on learning opportunities allowed my students to thrive as they were able to actively participate in problemsolving tasks. This program fostered critical thinking and teamwork in a way that was both fun and meaningful. Christine Collins, fifth grade, Highland. My students loved the hands-on learning and the trial and error components of robotics. The productive struggle was good for them. Liz Yelis, who's a fourth grade teacher at Highland, said, "My
039teachers were engaged and excited about robotics from day one. I loved watching them learn coding and apply their knowledge to real world tasks. This unit not only provided hands-on learning, but it also helped them use their problem solving and growth mindset skills." Jessica West, fifth grade, Norton. Students in my class are excited about the STEM program. Through collaboration with their peers, they have worked hard to problem solve and deepen their thinking. STEM has sparked enthusiasm and creativity in our classroom. So, we would like to thank you again for moving this meeting up so we could both attend. Uh, thank you for your support. We'd also like to thank Cheshire Ed Foundation who provided the grant for the robots. uh Marlene and Kevin for supporting us as we developed and implemented this curriculum. Of course, all
040the teachers who welcomed us into their classroom uh across the district and Mike uh Salamini for helping us with the video taping and all this tech today. Yes. Tiding. Yeah. Do you all have any questions or anything for us? I think we probably have questions. Uh Tony, would you a quick one? Thank you. Thank you so much for being here tonight and the overview program. I know there's probably a lot more information you wanted to share, but I think this is awesome. Uh kids that age on ability to collaborate together, trial and error, and you know, be free to do that and learn from that. That's awesome. Um my my question is kind of funny. Uh did the kids get a chance to name their robots? Were they able to do that? Yeah, they that's
041great. They can. So um the robots did come with a number but some of them were so excited and you can go in and change their name so that so what happens when you have to upload the program because it's all interconnected all these numbers would flash up. So then the students started naming them and then they would look for Robbie or whatever. There was a ton. Yes. Some some of them put name tags Oh on their robot. Awesome. Yeah, they were very possessive. Thanks, Mark. How many robots did you have? How many students per robot? We had 137, I believe, for the district. So, we would only run uh two schools at a time. And uh because there's only two of us and over 600 students and we had no more than two or
042three students per robot team. So, uh it was never more than a group of three. Mr. White, thank you so much for doing this. My daughter's in fifth grade and science isn't exactly a thing, but I know that you did enjoy it. So, thank you. Um, this is not intended as a trick question, but I did see something up there that I it piqued my interest. You said that you direct the kids to reliable media. I find media to be totally unreliable now. Oh, well media, not like the TV or anything like that. We just had articles that we put together. Gotcha. That talked specifically just to the pros and cons of the sustainable or unsustainable practice that they were learning about. Yeah. So, it was very filtered. Um, it was for their grade level.
043Um, and some of the words that we had to discover together so that they could connect, understanding, and comprehend what they were reading. A challenge that we had in designing this was it was for fourth and fifth graders. So finding information that was at their reading level, we had to adjust. So if we found an article that had the information, we worked with teachers in order to use tools they recommended in order to bring that to their reading level. We also found some great videos that talked about like um nutrients. It went into a little bit about like conservation. Um, we found one that was like a 60 minute blip that I'm sorry, 60-second blip that really broke down sustainable and unsustainable uh practices. again thinking globally and how agriculture is impacting all of us
044and how important like this idea of wow like agriculture exists and everything that we use comes from agriculture what does that mean for us thank you Mr. Grippo. Thank you. Uh wonderful program. So happy that we uh came together to support it last year. Um so I have uh two questions. So uh firstly you mentioned you had 12 sessions with the students. So is that 12 sessions per grade per school per subject or is that 12 sessions in total for robotics and agriculture? question. Second question after that. So every child saw us 12 times. So we saw four robotics and then 12 times for aggra science. So in total it was 24 sessions across each teacher within the district. 12 and 12. That's great. So that's that's a decent amount of time for like a
045special it's like an extension of the normal science curriculum, right? It's like an and they were all over town on any given day and robots but yeah that that's really great that's quite a bit of time um cong congratulations for executing that to all of you um and then secondly um what are the definitions that you use for sustainable and unsustainable agriculture and then anyone choose unsustainable agriculture as as far as their u I guess you know sustainable was more about the conservation of the land and having healthy soil so that you could have um healthy plants that then produced lots of product, right? No one that in any of my classes chose unsustainable. Um, and I felt like given the pros and cons, you could probably lean to something unsustainable. But because they had
046watched this short video clip and because we I mean we talk about this global impact like not we don't really go a lot into like land degradation or you know loss of habitat land fragmentation. It was more like we need agriculture to survive, right? And here are some really good practices that a farmer can use and which one given the choice would you want to see in your community? I know in my classes I had a not a lot but a couple of teams who chose the unsustainable practice but the pro the activity that we had them do was for looking for facts pros and cons about both and then comparing with another team. So if they were with another team and they had more pros in their unsustainable article, if they were able to
047back their statement up, then then we would talk about it as a class and say, "Okay, uh, is more pros better or is the quality of the pros and cons better?" And it would be a great conversation to have as a class, but yes, it did happen. So, not to dig too deep into it, but is it like organic farming versus petroleum based fertilizer or is is was that sort of the difference between the two or is it like organic farming uh tillillage um using manure, dispersing manure, um cover crops, cover crops, um fertilizer, green houses, hydroponics, hydroponics, um monoculture, hydroponics, um I want to say that we had 16, there was like eight and eight how we divided them up. You really covered quite a bit of methods. So yeah, that's that's really great.
048Thanks. Thank you. So, I just want to thank you for bringing this presentation to us tonight because Marlene did push really hard for this program to come to our fourth and fifth graders and now we can see what what she saw beforehand and and Kevin as well, what they saw in the advantages of offering this to fifth and fourth and fifth graders in our school district. So, thank you so much. They chose the right people. And it's not lost on me that our fourth and fifth graders also got science and robotics instruction from two women who are tops in their field. And one of them who was seven, eight, eight and three/4ers months pregnant. and the and what they learned was that women who are nine months pregnant can still think and can still do
049their jobs. So, thank you um for being the role models also that you were Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't even look to my right. Uh thank you so much. And um for the the board to see um the results of what we were asked to put up money for really helps us to go out to the community and say this is why we did it. We you know this is what the students did and what they learned and and it really gives us the ammunition to to support more endeavors like this. And to that uh Miss Cullen I I just also want to thank you. Um this was a great presentation this evening. I particularly liked um the information from the students, how heartfelt that was and and obviously the teachers. A couple questions. Um
050how did you choose or which how did you choose the NGSS the standard to work on for fourth grade and fifth grade? And the second follow-up question is next year. What is the plan for your fourth graders who have already had this right? where do they go next year or how what what does it look like? What's the curriculum look like? And again, thank you to Marlene and to Kevin for um bringing this forward for us to vote on last year. So, the standards directly from the framework. outlined uh for three through five and when we were tasked with an aggra science curriculum this was the the I think we had something initially in mind in terms of what we were expecting out of it and when we really dug into the standard we saw
051a sort of a different direction that we had to go in order to meet that standard in terms of how are we uh bringing in this idea of sustainability how are we having students uh investigate the effects of land and so I think our original idea was oh you know Cheshure is a farming community plants are fun and how can we incorporate the greenhouse at central office but after really unpacking that standard uh we saw that we needed to go a little deeper did you want to add on yeah um for the for the three-dimensional learning to take place it it was a lot for Steph and I we really had to think hard about the direction we were going to go in. So, we actually found a contact um through Kevin at one of
052the events. He was passing out flyers. So, we met with a woman from another high school that does not only agriculture, but um she works with uh animals, too. It's livestock. Is it Lyman? Was it Lyman? Lyman. Anyway, so we really collaborated with her and we broke agra agriculture down into these like we subdivided it and then we were like okay well we have 12 days what do we want like what would we like to do and Stephanie was like dirt I want to play with dirt and I was like okay but it has to li like let's line it up and we had to just search we had to go through the next generation science standard patterns and then go into that like environmental human environmental. There's a section in there and we started
053flipping through and it really does divide it for you. So then you can go to three through five and that's how we picked this and then because it was so big there's no way that we could have hit it all. So because we wanted dirt we wanted that's how we just broke it down. We went through a lot of brainstorming. We came up with a lot of questions. Um, and then we just had to hone it down and slim it down. For robotics, it was particularly the same. We were purchased the robots. It came with some material, but we really wanted them to be solving a problem. So maybe Stephanie and I knew that they were never going to build an actual robot to drive through the school, right? Which is what drove them. and
054motivated them. But it was like if you can't figure out a program for a prototype, how could we possibly invest in the money to build something that would actually navigate our campuses? So, it was really talking about criteria and constraints, right? This is the real world. This is the materials that we're given, right? And unless we're 100% with our prototype, we can't go anymore. and it was wonderful. It was a wonderful engineering design program. It just worked out so well. I'll answer the second second part of your question, which is what does next year look like? And so when when we undertook this endeavor, we knew that this was two-pronged. that we wanted students to have hands-on experiences, but we also wanted elementary teachers who are generalists and teach every subject to get coaching from
055people who had depth of knowledge around the NGSS because we'd done a lot of PD and some coaching at the middle school and high school, but our elementary folks needed needed more of that. And so next year, this wonderful aggra science unit that they've written will now replace something that was in our curriculum. And those teachers who co-taught it this year will teach it on their own next year with some coaching on the side as needed. So that we can decide and and we're we're talking about that now and working with teachers and principles to say where is the need next and what grade level will that be in. So, it's always two-pronged, students and teachers. And I I just want to thank both of the Stephanie's because I thought they did an excellent job
056really breaking this down tonight. And, you know, we have such different people in front of us. Stephanie Lopez Smith worked at um the Connecticut Science Center and served as one of our coaches and has worked a lot with adults and teaching adults and Stephanie Kungas has worked at the at the high school level and worked with high school students. And so I feel like the yin and yang of what they brought together when they came in and worked in an elementary school, I mean, what they what they're able to do and the time that it takes to write one of these units, I think you can see and based on their answers can see the depth of knowledge that they have. It's it's really incredible. Um, and when I said to them tonight, are you
057nervous? They said, um, nothing's worse than for, you know, having to fourth working into a fourth grade class. We got this. So, um, it's it's a different it's a different role. and I just want to thank them for all the incredible work they've done. And I want to give Mr. Hanland a shout out because the scheduling was um certainly tasking and he really was a communication person between all of the schools and all the principles to make this happen. So, thank you all. Thank you. And we're going to wrap this up because we have another meeting. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you. I'll receive a motion to adjourn. Take your choice. And uh Emory seconds. All in favor? See you in five minutes.