Thursday, January 31, 2013
CGS students bring Chinese language, culture to Brookside - Thehour.com: Elementary Schools
CGS students bring Chinese language, culture to Brookside - Thehour.com: Elementary Schools: NORWALK -- Walk by the Brookside Elementary School library on a Friday and you might hear elementary students uttering their first words of Chinese.
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Ancestors being Discovered
I recently signed up on Ancestor.Com web site. I enjoy reseaching about people in my family. There are many interesting artifacts about family members. The local Fitchburg Sentinel has archived many past issues going back to the early 1900's. I have started to build the Hay and Aho family trees. I found several things that I had completly forgot about over the years.
Raising the Curve
Raising the Curve: A Year Inside One of America’s 45,000 Failing Public Schools
Ron Berler. Berkley, (256p) ISBN 978-0-425-25268-0
Brookside Elementary School in Norwalk, Conn., is one of over 45,000 schools labeled “failing” because of low scores on annual mandatory state tests. Yet, according to journalist Berler’s inspiring story of one year in the life of the school, Brookside is hardly a failure. In a compulsively readable and fast-paced chronicle of the lives of administrators, teachers, and students, Berler captures the deep love the teachers have for their students and the teachers’ struggles to teach to the test while hoping to instill a love of learning. Among other students, we meet Marbella, who has great potential but who is not an especially dedicated student, and Hydea, a shy but deeply imaginative girl with great, though untapped, reading ability, who is performing below her grade level at the start of her fifth-grade year. Both girls find themselves in Mr. Morey’s class. Morey is a committed teacher who “spends his days instilling in his students an eagerness to learn” and watching them blossom. With Morey’s efforts, and the leadership of the school’s principal, Mr. Hay, and the school’s reading specialist, Mrs. Schaefer, Marbella, Hydea, and a number of other students show significant academic improvement and blossom when they enter middle school, a truer measure of the school’s success than the statewide test. (Mar.)
Reviewed on: 01/28/2013
On sale March 5, 2013
Ron Berler. Berkley, (256p) ISBN 978-0-425-25268-0
Brookside Elementary School in Norwalk, Conn., is one of over 45,000 schools labeled “failing” because of low scores on annual mandatory state tests. Yet, according to journalist Berler’s inspiring story of one year in the life of the school, Brookside is hardly a failure. In a compulsively readable and fast-paced chronicle of the lives of administrators, teachers, and students, Berler captures the deep love the teachers have for their students and the teachers’ struggles to teach to the test while hoping to instill a love of learning. Among other students, we meet Marbella, who has great potential but who is not an especially dedicated student, and Hydea, a shy but deeply imaginative girl with great, though untapped, reading ability, who is performing below her grade level at the start of her fifth-grade year. Both girls find themselves in Mr. Morey’s class. Morey is a committed teacher who “spends his days instilling in his students an eagerness to learn” and watching them blossom. With Morey’s efforts, and the leadership of the school’s principal, Mr. Hay, and the school’s reading specialist, Mrs. Schaefer, Marbella, Hydea, and a number of other students show significant academic improvement and blossom when they enter middle school, a truer measure of the school’s success than the statewide test. (Mar.)
Reviewed on: 01/28/2013
On sale March 5, 2013
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