ELEMENTARY CAPSTONE EXPERIENCES LEAD TO HIGHER LEARNING
ox Chapel Area FOX CHAPEL AREA SCHOOL NEWS
ELEMENTARY CAPSTONE EXPERIENCES LEAD TO HIGHER LEARNING
This year, Fox Chapel Area rolled out a new elementary gifted curriculum that is designed to enrich the studies of both gifted and high-performing learners. The curriculum includes three capstone experiences and provides a cross‐curricular project-based approach to learning. The first, creative connections, was English Language Arts( ELA)-based in which students wrote and published their own books. Students learned engineering concepts as they worked on a series of design challenges in the second capstone experience, innovative inquiry. The third capstone experience, application avenue, is math-based, and students, depending on their grade level, are engaging in either a stock market challenge with virtual money or a data analysis project.
“ We are thrilled about the changes to the curriculum and have seen our students grow as a result of these efforts,” said Ashley Nestor, the district’ s executive director of elementary education and instruction.
Students Write and Publish Their Own Books
Inspired by the“ Encyclopedia Brown” series of books, O’ Hara Elementary School third grade friends Sam Troutman and Michael Costello worked together to write“ The Mystery of the Disappearing Act.” Sam said he likes coming up with ideas and“ I just wrote them down as they came to me.” Michael added,“ We just made it up, beginning to end. It was really exciting!”
The O’ Hara students are referring to the ELA capstone experience that included both gifted and high-achieving students from all four elementary schools who wrote and published their own books.
“ The purpose of the creative writing strand is for students to learn to love to write without being constrained,” O’ Hara Elementary School gifted support teacher Kara Cornett told parents at a recent Authors Share day in which 18 third grade authors shared their soon-to-be-published works. The Authors Share was part of the new ELA creative connections capstone.
Two O’ Hara students shared their stories about the adventures of Turtle Guy at the Authors Share event.
10 Fox Chapel Area
The young O’ Hara authors wrote fantasy, mystery, and adventure stories – the types of stories in which these students are interested. Ms. Cornett said that students learned about prewriting, writing, revising, and“ editing, editing, editing” over the 10-week process.“ At the beginning of the project, there were some reluctant writers out there, but they have become passionate about writing,” she said. Now they were ready to share their works, Ms. Cornett told parents who attended the authors’ presentations.“ I can personally say that there are great, great stories out there.”
The young student authors met with their teacher for two 45-minute periods a week to write their books. Here, gifted support teacher Tammy Balestrino works with Hartwood Elementary School students.
Nora Kelley and Atia DiGioia worked together to write“ Evergreen Academy” and the book’ s cover features original artwork by Nora. Both girls said they like to read fantasy books, and not coincidentally, their original story is a fantasy in which characters they created are in a forest and enter through a portal to get to school. Nora said,“ I liked to use our imagination to think about characters, setting, and plot.”
At Hartwood Elementary School,“ We’ ve got some fact finders,” gifted support teacher Tammy Balestrino reported about her young creative connections participants.“ These kids like to know about certain things.” One student wrote a book on Gettysburg, one on 9-11, and one on Pittsburgh.
A Hartwood Elementary student works on his original book.
Mrs. Balestrino said creative connections covers important concepts such as figurative language,