Ms. Engle´s 8th Grade Exploratory Careers class, just finished learning about the Education and Training Cluster. The students then chose something that they would like to teach the class to do. The class learned how to make a duct tape bow tie, lava lamp, playdough and paper airplanes, just to name a few.
As the new school year gets underway, clubs and organizations are getting started up again too. The FFA, SkillsUSA, FBLA and FCCLA clubs held a recruitment party at the Fairbury Country Club. There was swimming, pizza, and rootbeer floats for the new and returning members. As the night started to wind down, each club had a representative of their organization try to persuade newcomers to join. It was a fun night full of food and laughter.
The Fairbury FFA Chapter kicked off the year by serving their community. On Saturday, August 20th, seventeen FFA members teamed up to pick up a three mile stretch of trash west of Fairbury along highway 136. This is an annual community service event for the chapter as they pick up trash once during the fall time and once during the spring time. After the roadsides were picked up, Mr.Dux grilled some hotdogs for the members who helped out with the community activity. This was a great start to the year and provided a fun time of fellowship for the members that participated.
Fifth grade students in Mrs. Ruhnke’s grade class are learning to use “Go Formative”, a website that allows them to write and draw on their touchscreen Chromebooks. Students have been using this website to practice vocabulary words in reading class and to work out various arithmetic problems in math class. This program allows to teacher to see the student’s answers on her computer screen and provide immediate feedback to them.
FHS art students were chalking the walks for the 1st Friday Art Walk in downtown Fairbury. The students chose to reproduce works of the great masters. They were on display for the weekend.
“The 5th graders this week experienced music from another culture. We learned and performed Zhao Peng You, a Chinese folksong which means “looking for friends”. We learned how to sing the song in Chinese, and learned some simple movements to go with the song. In addition, we discovered Chinese history and culture, and learned about two Chinese instruments, the Pipa and Erhu.”
Sixth Grade in World History learned about the stories that cave paintings tell us about life during Paleolithic times. We spent some time creating our own cave paintings to show what we learned about life during the Stone Age!
Third grade students enjoyed learning with an OSMO, a unique accessory for the ipad. OSMO is designed specifically for children from 5 to 12 years of age. Third grade students loved it and were very engaged in all the learning activities they tried. The OSMO encourages learning in many areas; coding, creative thinking, logic, problem solving, confidence, engineering, spelling and math. OSMO brings real world and social play to the iPad, by transforming the space in front of the tablet into an interactive environment.
OSMO games are designed so that they can be played alone, or socially with friends, parents or teachers. OSMO in the classroom brings students together around an iPad and engages them to learn collaboratively. Unlike other tablet apps which can isolate students, OSMO inspires students to seek social interaction.
OSMO was created by a pair of ex-Googlers who, after having kids, decided to create a way of bringing real-world play back into the digital world and encourage social interaction, creative thinking and problem-solving. After 12 months, and several prototypes, they came up with OSMO and our third grade students are very glad they did.
