It is always exciting to hear about our staff’s personal success and this time, Rainbow Community School wants to congratulate our very own sixth grade teacher, Jennifer Armocida! Jennifer’s project, “Better Business: Socially Beneficial Entrepreneurship,” was selected by the Freedoms Foundation to receive their highest award for excellence in enterprise education. The Freedom Foundation recognizes educators for their innovative efforts to help young people better understand the function and benefits of America’s private enterprise system.
Jenny’s sixth-grader students each create a socially responsible business. Her young entrepreneurs learn how to write a business plan, apply for loans, write a marketing plan and more. The most exciting part is the actual launch of their businesses — some become very successful. This year, Jennifer’s project was selected as one of the best in the nation and will receive a formal recognition and a cash award during a special award ceremony in November2015.
Congratulations, Jennifer, for this award! We are very happy you are a part of Rainbow Community School.
Here at Rainbow Community School, it is always a pleasure to know about what is happening with our alumni.This time, Rainbow had the honor of having Dunken, Adriana, Geronimo, Mackenzie, Michael, and Zoe share their thoughts and experiences about how the Rainbow experience has impacted their lives during the panel night “Beyond Rainbow.”
Alumni Night
The panel was a great source for parents to hear from alumni about the student experience and how the Rainbow experience helps shape students’ relationships with the world. This panel enriched our community, increased others’ knowledge of what Rainbow is about, and allowed students to share how they feel about being a part of this community.
Thanks again to Dunken, Adriana, Geronimo, Mackenzie, Michael, and Zoe for being so open and sharing your dreams, experiences, and aspirations. Rainbow Community school is so proud of you!
Imagine, if you will, a creative competition that allows students to express themselves artistically, physically, emotionally, spiritually – basically, this expression is in alignment with Rainbow’s Seven domains of child development.
Now imagine the pressure of performing for judges, parents and against other schools.
Add to it elements of the creative problem students tackled that students had to include, or otherwise they’d lose points.
Coaches were allowed to advise and guide the teams, but the students had to do all the work. In fact, they had to sign a contract saying that they would not accept outside help as they worked through their projects.
This year at Rainbow, there was so much interest in Odyssey of the Mind or OOTM!
Creative Problem Solving
We started out with four teams in grades 6-8 – they were considered Division II. When it came time to go to competition, we ultimately had two teams that headed to Enka High School to compete against area schools.
There are two parts to the competition. There is the “spontaneous” problem where students get a question and have to answer creatively. The more creative they can be, the more points they can get. Students do not know what question they will get, so they will usually practice a variety of problems beforehand to get used to coming up with answers “on the fly.”
Then, there’s the “long-term” problem. Earlier in the school year, students will choose one of five problems put out by the OOTM folks. They spend every practice session working together to come up with a solution to the problem, working within the limits and parameters that the problem encompasses.
One team did “Pandora’s Box” and one team did “Silent Movie.” Each had an eight-minute time limit.
From the OOTM website, here are the problem synopses:
Pandora’s Box:
In this classics problem, teams will put a video game spin on the story of Pandora’s Box. A gamer character will take on this multi-level game inspired by the Greek myth. The game will include a prologue that depicts the original story of Pandora’s Box, three characters representing different evils that escaped the box, and a power meter that represents the gamer character’s health. To beat the game, the player will advance to the final level where it will release hope into the world.
Silent Movie:
Lights, camera…action! In this problem teams will create and present a performance depicting a Director character that produces and presents a silent movie featuring a humorous villain character that commits three silly acts of “villainy”. Characters that are in the movie may not speak as part of the presentation of the movie. Instead, like classic silent films, the team will use music played on a team-created instrument and creatively displayed subtitles to convey its story to the audience and judges. Also, teams will use a signal to indicate when the movie begins and ends.
Winning It!
Team 1
Team 1 placed 3rd in their Division, addressing the Silent Movie Problem. After competition day, the team performed for a Rainbow audience. This team really did a great job creating a wonderful and funny “movie.” Take a look at some photos of their performance:
(Click on any image to start a slide show):
Team 2
Team 2 came in 2nd place which means they are going to the state competition!!
They addressed the Pandora’s Box problem and you could tell they really had a lot of fun using their creative talents to put it all together.
Take a look at some of the photos from their performance at Rainbow:
Awards Ceremony
After the performances came the Awards Ceremony. First, special thanks went out to Edward, the OOTM coach, and all the parent volunteers who helped with all the OOTM meetings.
Gratitude goes out to other Rainbow staff and teachers who gave up space, time and otherwise contributed to the success of the groups: Jenny, Justin, Melissa, Pamela, Rachel, Tracie, Jason & Susan.
The 2nd and 3rd place trophies and certificates were incredibly special!
Did you ever go to a symposium at a convention center as a kid? Like a space symposium?
Because that’s what the science fair was like. All the classrooms transformed into exposition sites, complete with beautiful posters, and display boards of colorful, imaginative, and quite advanced scientific experiments and investigations last week.
Students On Tour
Every class at Rainbow had a chance to visit other classrooms to see what other students did. In fact, each class played host, and each class visited all the other classrooms on campus and listened while other students presented their work.
Here you can see Omega visiting the fifth grade classroom. Not only were the fifth graders great presenters, but they also had the Omegans quite interested in what they were doing!
In fourth grade, many more fun and innovative projects characterized the classroom. Fourth graders presented to second grade. It’s simply amazing how well fourth grade presented and how attentive second grade was!
Wouldn’t you like to know more about “What does and does not conduct electricity?” Yeah, we were interested, too.
All around, these projects were quite sophisticated and complex. Each student investigated what interested him or her. To be sure, they take the meaning, “citizen scientist” to a whole new level!
In the video below, we focus on two third grade presenters. Their projects show such in-depth research!
Another third grader looked at hovercraft and if the amount of air in them affected how they float:
And really, does corn syrup actually make bubbles last longer? You’d think so, right?
You’ll have to ask the third grade to find out! How’s that for a cliffhanger?
Over in Omega, you could get a glimpse into how well you read emotions if you’re not looking at someone’s whole face to take in all the information:
And take a look at the Omega classroom itself. It looked like a veritable convention center of scientists and peers at work!
We have so many more fun photos to share! The photos below are courtesy of Sheila Mraz. She was all over campus snapping photos of all the exhibits and presentations.
And we have a resident photographer on campus! The following photos were taken by Ban, one of our Omega students!
You can really capture a glimpse of the breadth, scope and sophistication of these science projects. They’re a big deal around here.
Now, if you have any questions, just ask one of our citizen scientists!
It’s that time of year again: time to do the awesomely awesome Omega PIP presentations!
Each student in the Omega classroom did a research project on something that was of interest to them – hence the name, Personal Interest Project, or PIP.
And what a variety of interests, indeed! Projects included research on magic, dreaming, dungeons and dragons, forensics, mythology, Dr. Who, historical impact of pottery, the Northern Lights, the Clash, the Bermuda Triangle, the Irish Independence Wars and more. Since each student had to present his or her research, you can imagine the varied and wonderful learning that was going on!
Students had three rubrics for which they needed to fulfill requirements: the paper portion, the presentation portion and the PowerPoint portion.
The paper portion of the presentation had nine main categories in the rubric, each with a list of requirements. These included organization, amount and quality of information, paragraph construction, conventions (i.e. spelling errors), sources, no plagiarism, works cited, title page, and inclusion of rough drafts. This portion of the project was worth up to 200 points.
The second part of the project, of course, was the presentation portion. Omega teachers evaluated the kiddos on their verbal presentational ability, creativity, relevant questions for students to ask and how well students listened to the presentation.
Still, the PowerPoint presentation was another integral part of the project. They requirements fell into 7 categories in which students needed to create professional-looking slideshows that enhanced their presentations. Many students chose to work with a new and exciting web-based application: Prezi.
During the presentations, each student created an activity for the rest of the class to try. Everything from Jeopardy-like games to relay races of sorts, these allowed students to demonstrate their understanding of whatever topic was presented.
You wouldn’t believe how each and every student came through and not only completed the requirements, but really sparkled and radiated their interests through their presentations.
One student, Alex, let us film a part of his presentation on fishing. He was clear, and thoroughly understood the complexities behind why people are overfishing, but also conveyed what we all can do to curb this global problem:
These students are rock stars! They’re already talking about doing their own version of TED Talks for their PIPs for next year!
