Summer Learning
Summer 2020
Mrs. Angela Marshall, Grade 6
I took two college classes: 1. Anxiety Awareness: Empowering Students with Help and Hope. This course taught me some great tools to help support students who have anxiety, including accommodations and coping skills. 2. Raise the Bar: Positive Interventions for Students Who Challenge Us. In this course, I learned about many different strategies to help students achieve their target goals using positive behavioral interventions. I also took advantage of many cyber trainings this summer, with a special focus on becoming more familiar with Google Suite and how to teach remotely more effectively.
Ms. Shelly McPherson, Kindergarten
I finished my Master's plus 45. I took 3 online courses from Professional Development Institute. Content area multi-sensory teaching for special need students. This class was a great class to remind me that I am teaching to the best of my ability meeting all the senory areas to help children learn. I truly enjoyed this class. Developing Phonemic Awareness in Emergent Readers. This was a great refresher class to help me reach all types of readers. Guiding Emergent and Early Strugging Writers to Success. This class gave me some great teaching points to add to my writer's workshop lessons, especially for those struggling writers.
Mrs. Lynette Musoni, Speech Pathologist
It has been a busy and productive summer! Due to COVID-19 there were many new speech-language related trainings available. I have completed over 35 hours of speech-langauge trainings and teletherapy focused trainings to help students with specific needs on my caseload. In addition, I completed the 30 hours of Intermediate Orton-Gillingham training, a multi-sensory reading approach. I look forward to supporting students using this approach in phonological awareness, morphology and vocabulary building.
Mrs. Amy Prenatt, K-3 Learning Support
This summer contained many opportunities for me to extend my knowledge in a variety of areas. I completed a course on how our brain learns and gained new knowledge about working memory, recall of previously learned information and ways to enhance initial learning to promote better retention. To help students to improve reading skills, I participated in a training on a research-based approach for decoding words and spelling. I am looking forward to starting these ideas with students to learn new literacy concepts that will serve them well into their future. I also attended several sessions on infusing technology in the classroom. These things can be used in a virtual classroom or in a brick and mortar classroom. Some of the topics included Screencastify, many Google applications, Bitmojis, Flipgrid and other possibilities to give students freedom to choose how to demonstrate their learning. It was a busy summer and now I look forward to using what I have gained to help students to learn and to have fun while learning!
Mrs. Jeanne Rose, Librarian
I participated in over 140 hours of professional development since March. I learned about online platforms like Epic!, Flip Grip, Google Suite, SeeSaw, Screencastify, Loom and Khan Academy. I participated in five PSEA book discussions and learned Mindfulness and wellness practices. I am excited to use/share what I learned.
Mrs. Joy Shaffer, Technology Teacher
This summer was packed full of professional development and STEM training. In addition to the district required trainings, I completed the Google Certification Level 1 requirements and am currently working towards level 2. I attended two online summits: STEM Teacher Summit presented by Carly & Adam and KTICyber Summit presented by PAECT. Youth Mental Health First Aid is another training that I completed in August to update ACT 71 requirements. The Summits provided great STEM & Makerspace resources for the elementary classroom. Topics like literacy in the Makerspace and how to teach STEM like a BOSS were presented. Ideas and tools were collected to bring back to this school year for both in person and distance learning. I have never felt so energized to start a new school year than I do now! The amount of new information I gathered this summer was exciting and I can't wait to come back and share it with everyone!
Mrs. Kim Turner, Grade 4
For me this has been the summer of Professional Development. I have spent the majority of my days working on classes or attending MANY Zoom meeting presentations. My entire focus has been on technology because that is the area that I needed to develop the most! I took the courses: Effectively Using iPads to Transform the Classroom, Using Google Classroom for Teaching and Learning, Mastering Google Apps for Education and Ignite Your Professional Teaching Practice. The last course was where I had the opportunity to bring all of my learning together to create resources that will make teaching this year much easier, and more creative in terms of providing learning opportunities using technology. While it wasn't easy by any means, it is what I needed as an educator, and more importantly....what my students need!
Mrs. Teresa Yarnell, Kindergarten
I recently completed three graduate classes that enabled me to reach my Master's+45. In the course Math Manipulatives in the Primary Classroom, I learned about ways to incorporate hands on learning through the use of manipulatives. In the course Guiding Emergent and Early Struggling Writers to Success, I learned about ways to scaffold the steps of the writing process to meet the needs of our young learners. In the last course, Content Area Multi-Sensory Teaching for Students with Special Needs, I learned a variety of visual, auditory, tactile and kinesthetic strategies to help support different learning styles.Through the district and IU5 provided workshops, I learned about Powerschool, digital Google instructional tools and how to create my own Youtube channel. I also enjoyed some KTI virtual sessions this summer and learned about how to create a virtual Bitmoji classroom, Google Classroom, mindfulness strategies and the importance of teacher self care.
Mrs. Erin Fonzo, Principal
I completed two more courses (6 credits) this summer in my pursuit of my Masters in Restorative Practices. Social and Emotional Learning in the Restorative Classroom gave me more tools to support and soothe students who need it, while Aggression Replacement Training (ART): Behavioral Interventions that Work certified me to deliver this research-proven intervention to students. Both courses were inspiring and I look forward to using what I learned to help our students at Maplewood succeed.
I also earned my Google Level I Certified Educator status as well as continued to participate weekly in a PA STEM Leadership cohort where school leaders from around the state who are passionate about STEM meet with Judd Pittman, Special Consultant to the Secretary of Education on STEM, weekly to discuss state STEM policies and initiatives.
Our Students ROAR!
We LOVE having the opportunity to help our students succeed and we're very proud of them for repeatedly making the right choices. We hope you are as excited as we are about the great work that the students have been doing. Our recent SWPBiS evaluation confirms what we already know..... MES is PAWS-itively the best!
About Us
Email: efonzo@penncrest.org
Website: http://www.maplewoodelm.net/
Location: 32695 Pennsylvania 408, Townville, PA, USA
Phone: (814)337-1659
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MaplewoodElem
Twitter: @Maplewood_Elem