The West Windsor-Plainsboro Education Foundation has granted awards to five teachers in the WW-P school district for a variety of innovative programs.
The awards, part of the “Excellence in Education” grant program, were made to the following teachers:
Denise Nugent, a reading specialist at Dutch Neck Elementary, $770 for a Reading to Excel program that fosters a partnership between home and school.
The goal of the program is to develop an expanded lending library of a variety of books and parent reading guides to be used by the school’s lower level second grade students between school and home to help improve their reading skills. These students are identified as having reading needs and are in need of supplemental reading.
Mary Jo Gonsiorowski, third grade teacher at Dutch Neck Elementary School, $400 for the Junior FIRST Lego League (FLL) Robotics program.
In this program, students will be engaged in technology, problem solving, research, and teamwork through the Junior FIRST Lego League program. “This is a hands-on project designed to capture young children’s curiosity and creativity through the solution to a theme based real-life problem or global issue,” states a press release from the WW-P school district.
Marcey Mandell, an English as a Second Language (ESL), $400 was granted to the Build-A-Vocabulary program at Town Center Elementary School. Mandell administers the program. The goal is to encourage families where English is not the language used at home, to spend time working with their children to build a core vocabulary in English, stated a description of the program in a press release.
This will be done with the help of a thematic picture dictionary. Parents will attend an informational meeting where classroom teachers and the ESL teacher will present a variety of strategies that can be used to cultivate a word bank using a thematic approach at home, the press release states. A calendar of events to take place during the year in the kindergarten classrooms will be shared with parents.
Janette Young., fourth grade teacher at the Village School, $800 for the Magnets and Their Forces program. In this program, 330 students in fourth grade science classes will be targeted.
The grade 4 science curriculum includes a unit that covers electricity and magnetism. The grant allows for the purchase of six magnet kits for each class to accompany the electricity kits. Adding these materials to the current electricity kit to use for hands-on work will help meet the science curriculum needs for magnetism, the press release states.
Danielle Bugge, science teacher at High School South, $1,010 granted to the Electronic Footprints program that targets students in the oceanography and meteorology course at South. “In today’s increasingly technological society, students carry in their pocket a device that can pinpoint their location to within a few feet,” states the press release. “Without even being aware, students make daily use of a series of satellites orbiting the Earth at a height of 22,000 miles.”
Students are unaware that this tool is essential to scientific research presently being conducted about the Earth, the press release states. Students have not had the ability to engage in an interactive study of their environment. The purchase of handheld GPS units will allow students, with teacher guidance, the opportunity to collect and analyze data to develop a complete picture of the process by which science currently studies our environment, the description reads.
The WW-P Education Foundation is a private, nonprofit organization. It supports the continued excellence of the WW-P district.
Corporate sponsors who contributed to the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) “Excellence in Education” Grant Program include Bristol-Myers Squibb, Novo Nordisk, Integra Foundation, and Janssen, division of Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals.
