MCCS Updates
January 4th 2019
Happy New Year!
Leo Talk Tuesday 6-8
You’re Invited!
On Tuesday, January 8th MCCS will host a parent information night on STEM Education, model-eliciting activities (MEA)s and our professional development with Dr. Courtney Baker from George Mason University. Learn about how the important work we are doing connects to state and national STEM initiatives, and brings current research practices to our students. Be ready to engage in hands-on activities and critical thinking!
What’s in a Name?
STEM? STEAM? SMET? How do we make sense of this alphabet soup? In the simplest sense, STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. This acronym began as a way to address the perceived shortage of skilled workers pursuing high-tech jobs and has implications beyond K-12 classrooms. Currently, STEM plays an increasingly important role in addressing societal need to improve the global economy. Ultimately, how one defines ‘STEM’ is based on their personal experiences and how they position themselves in their field. For example, mathematicians advocate the importance of mathematics within STEM and engineers speak to the importance of engineering design process and creating models with generalizability. While there are many ways to implement STEM in K-6 settings, of utmost importance is providing all students with authentic opportunities to interact with content that is traditionally taught in isolation, out of context, or post-mastery.
Model-Eliciting Activities
Model-eliciting activities let students engage in the engineering design process to solve real-life, client-driven problems and allow teachers insight into student thinking. Teachers facilitate student collaboration and problem solving as students apply their mathematical understandings, explore possible strategies, assess their thinking, compare solutions, and produce a generalizable model. The engineering design processes within MEAs support the goals of mathematics and STEM learning by integrating concepts found inside and outside of mathematics, encouraging learning through discovery. This specific type of modeling embeds grade-level content within. Each MEA connects to multiple state standards across mathematics, science, reading, writing and social studies depending on the context! Since elementary teachers teach multiple subjects, MEAs are designed perfectly for K-6 classrooms and can be used to provide insight into student thinking at any place in a unit.
Important Message from the PTO
Dear MCCS Community,
Happy New Year! With the new year, changes are coming to the PTO. With the recent departure of our Treasurer, there are two vacancies on the PTO board. It is also time to fill the positions that will become vacant starting in the 2019-2020 school year.
As the immediate vacancies (President and Treasurer) are to replace sudden departures, they will begin immediately. The two position terms will be slightly longer than one year (running from now until June 2020). The other positions (VP and Secretary) will follow the usual process of shadowing current board members in March and beginning a two-year term with the start of the 2019-2020 school year.
As a result, elections for the PTO board will be held in January for the following positions:
President (to begin immediately; 1.5 year term)
Vice President (to begin Fall 2019; shadowing begins March 2019, 2 year term)
Treasurer (to begin immediately; 1.5 year term)
Secretary (to begin Fall 2019; shadowing begins March 2019, 2 year term)
Having a fully operational PTO is vital to the school's success, and is a requirement of the school charter. Please consider whom you might nominate to fill these important positions!
This is a time of great transition for the PTO board, but we are hopeful that many positive changes will result. We hope you will consider being a part of it!
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Always feel free to directly contact any MCCS PTO Board Member
| Jenny Teasdale | Eryn Mask | Amber Parker |
Addition and Subtraction Action with the K/1’s!
Bus Hub Meeting
Questions about MCCS? All are welcome to join us in Conference room B at Rust Library on January 25th at 3:00 pm