December 19, 2012,

Today in our PLC we discussed the events of last week.  Ms. Libal, Mr. Kreiling, and myself thoroughly enjoyed the presentations we observed.  It was very special to see everyone come together to put on such an event.  I especially was intrigued by Ms. Lowe's presentation and the many technological applications that she employs in the classroom.  I have spoke with Ms. Lowe and plan to pick her brain some more in order to gain enough understanding of the technology to feel comfortable using it in my classroom.  We did, however, think that our presentation came off very well.  We were and are proud of the work that we have done and will continue to do in the future.
  

Showcase Supplies???

I do not see a request for any supplies for your Showcase presentation.  If something comes up, be sure to see Mr. Black by November 30th.

ESL Group October 31st

Today I had the pleasure of visiting another PLC group in order to learn more about what other groups are doing. I visited the group of Mrs. Ault, Mrs. Caminos, and Mrs. Ripley. We discussed the process of getting students to talk more in class through whole class discussions and small group discussions. We were able to brainstorm some ideas about how to get students to be more comfortable in class where they feel that they may talk more in class. Overall this was a very productive day and there were many great ideas brought up.

Thanks,
Jeff Kreiling

PLC Showcase

At the end of our semester of work, all PLCs will be showcasing their work at the Wyandotte High School PLC Showcase on Wednesday, December 12th in the Social Hall.  The showcase will be a public demonstration of our learning, collaboration, and results.  Each PLC will showcase work that reflects how your learning and collaboration has impacted student learning.  Each PLC is encouraged to be creative and innovative in their demonstration (student examples would be highly encouraged); however, please be sure the following are addressed through your presentation -
    PLC Focus

Collaborative Actions   

Summary of PLC Learning

Impact on Student Learning

Connections to Future Teaching and Learning

In addition, all staff will have an opportunity to visit each demonstration during the Showcase.  Many outside guests will also be in attendance.  

If your PLC requires any kind of additional resources, please submit any requests for those materials via the comment section to this blog entry by NOVEMBER 9th. You will receive these materials by or before your November 28th meeting, so you will have AT LEAST two weeks to work on organizing your demonstration.

October 24th, 2012

Over the past week I was able to take a group of seniors to the World War I Memorial in Kansas City, MO. This ended up being a excellent opportunity for me to incorporate math and Social Studies together. I was able to do so when we were in the part of the museum where the students can view the numbers of those who died during World War I. I had several students look up what the populations of the countries that were involved with World War I were while the war was going on. Once we had determined what the total populations were, I had them then see how these numbers compared to the numbers of people who were killed from select countries during World War I. I think that not only was this a good way to incorporate math and social studies, but it was also a very big eye-opener for students. It seemed as if this was probably one of the first times where the students truly saw the percentage of people who died during World War I. I was able to show the students that in some cases, whole towns basically lost nearly all the men and young men during the war. When we took a look at the level of wounded people it was even more astounding than was the percentage of those who died. Overall I think that this was a successful fieldtrip and I was very happy to get such a good chance to incorporate both math and social studies into the students school day.

Thank You,
Jeff Kreiling

October 17th, 2010

Today Mr. Kreiling and myself continued to work on integrating math into the Social Studies curriculum.  I have a World War I unit coming up in this next few weeks and we are thinking this is an excellent opportunity to incorporate some math into the classroom. 

October 17th, 2012

Coming up in the next week we will be discussing two different subjects. The first being the relationship that can happen between math and government. This can be in the form of population sizes, economics, and especially taxes. Another subject is the correlation between math and World War I. During our World War I topic, we plan on looking at the different numbers of those killed from the different countries that were involved in World War I. Once we have dipped into these numbers we plan to look at the ratio and how that relates to the population numbers of the countries involved. This way students can truly realize the numbers lost in World War I and the percentage of people in countries who were lost during World War I. The second is we will try to find a correlation to formulate the chances that those in the service had of survival in the war.

Thank You,
Jeff Kreiling

October 3rd, 2012

This week we were able to correlate the interest period into our Economics class. We worked on figuring out interest rates when discussing credit cards while the students were given a set interest rate that they would be paying on a credit card. We were able to incorporate technology by showing the students the different tools that can be used on the internet such as interest calculators and tools to calculate time to pay off debt.

Jeff Kreiling

First Time

This is my first attempt at blogging.  I thought that only one person from our group had to blog, but was informed that I was wrong.  Anyway, we'll see if anyone reads these things.

10/3/12

We've been working on lessons that Shane and I can co-teach.  One of the lessons involves using the distance formula and equation for distance during his lesson on explorers - their path to their destination.  Using the distance formula, we can use coordinates on a map to calculate. 

Today on 09/26/2012, we decided to discuss interest rate and the correlation that can be made through both math and social studies. We have decided that we would be able to correlate interest rate into math as well as into our Econ/Government course. This will allow students to not only understand the function of interest rates but also how students may be able to use interest rates in the real world.

Thank you,
Jeff Kreiling

September 5th, 2012

During our PLC time we worked our ability to integrate the Cartesian Plane into our Social Studies classes. Rene Descartes is who developed the Cartesian Plane which can be used in both math and Social Studies. In math this is used primarily in helping to graph different coordinates which are usually listed as (X,Y). Rene Descartes was also a French philosopher during the which ties in well when discussing the different philosophers in World History during the Scientific Revolution. During this time great strides were made in mathematics.

World History class will be able to incorporate the Cartesian Plane when discussing the Age of Exploration through the next week to two weeks. The Cartesian Plane is an excellent visual aid to use with students in describing maps and also coordinates during the Age of Exploration. We also discussed using charts in order to use statistics in the classroom for weather changes and also populations such as the "Rise & Fall of the Roman Empire".

Kreiling, Trueblood, Libal

Jeff Kreiling,

1. We will continue to plan to incorporate latitude & longitude into lesson plans for the Age of Exploration unit in Social Studies classrooms.

2. This will contribute to students learning by allowing students to use graphing with latitude & longitude in the Social Studies classroom. This will help students with understanding the concepts of graphing when also used in the math classroom.

3. This weeks work should be shown through both the lesson plan around longitude and latitude incorporated with the student learning and possible worksheets that are included.