Our school has been awarded grant-funding for the following projects:

Congratulations Mrs. Louviere and Mrs. Friday

S.H.A.R.E.  (Alexia Louviere, 6th & 7th grades)

                    Sharing stories is a long-time tradition that offers students relevance for meeting grade level expectations to become skill-proficient in their English Language Arts curriculum.  In addition, good writing teachers know that students write better when they write from their own experiences.  At the beginning of the school year, our students were deeply affected by Hurricane Katrina as they welcomed and served the victims that became their classmates and friends for a month.  For Calcasieu and Cameron Parish students, 2005 will go down in history as the year Rita replaced Audrey in terms of natural disasters, and the students all have both common and unique experiences that not only should be shared among friends and family but also recorded to pass down to future generations, just as the stories of 1957’s Audrey.   We believe we can use this disaster and others that may come in this predicted hurricane cycle to equip students with writing skills and coping skills that will have both academic and therapeutic value through a technology-based writing project.  With time and practice, students will be able to transition their skills to other events that may try to hamper their lives.

                    Implementation of a technology-based writing project affords students the opportunity to acquire important skills established in the United States Department of Labor’s report entitled, “Skills Needed for the Work Place of the 21^st Century.”  According to this report, students need to master the following skills:  to organize research and to work with others; to acquire, evaluate and use information; and to understand complex work systems.  A mobile writing mini-lab will ensure our ELA students opportunity for mastery of these skills as well as those currently used in the State’s comprehensive ELA curriculum and the grade level expectations in the technology strand.   Mobility also will allow for use by more than one teacher/classroom and will allow for a variety of groupings within one classroom and/or between classrooms.

                    In SHARE (Sharing History, Anecdotes, Research, and Experiences), 6^th and 7^th grade ELA students will use the Internet to research, Inspiration software to brainstorm and organize their ideas, digital video to record their oral autobiographical data, digital cameras to illustrate, Microsoft Office to write their stories and publish them in several formats, including PowerPoint presentation and Publisher newsletters and brochures, and the LCD projector to share their stories.  The products will be compiled cumulatively into one CD that students will be able to keep to document their experiences and learning as well as to share with others.  A global aspect of the project will be the presentation of class-selected projects to share with middle school students of Dr. Cynthia Mee at the National-Louis University, who has sent a list of questions written for our students by her young Chicago adolescents who are very curious about the hurricane phenomenon and how middle school students in Louisiana responded.  Knowing that middle school voices provide a unique but important perspective of lessons learned, we also hope to present the students’ experiences of “Surviving Rita” at the 2006 National Middle School Association Conference in Nashville, Tennessee.  

                    The grant for our S.H.A.R.E. project includes funding to purchase 5 laptop computers, a printer, an LCD projector, a digital video camera, 2 digital cameras, and software.

What Will I Be When I Grow Up? (Carla Friday, 3rd, 4th, 5th grades)

            What Will I Be When I Grow Up? is a technology program that will prepare 375 third through fifth grade students for careers in the 21^st century and give these students the opportunity to gain computer proficiency skills to share their new knowledge. Students will have the opportunity to hear guest speakers tell about various careers, research career opportunities, and create multimedia products demonstrating and sharing their knowledge of a wide variety of careers. Funds will be used to purchase fifteencomputers for student use. Third grade students will have three guest speakers and will use computers to create a report for each career  with a minimum of one picture inserted into the document. Fourth graders will have four guest speakers, use the Internet for further exploration, and create a brochure featuring each career. Fifth graders will have four guest speakers, use the Internet for further exploration, and create a PowerPoint featuring each career.

         What Will I Be When I Grow Up? will better prepare our students for the 21^st century by exposing them to a wide variety of careers, making them aware of the educational requirements of such careers, give them experience in using up-to-date technology, and give them experience in making presentations to others.   The grant for this project will fund 15 desktop computers.