Meeting #6

In addition to our meeting this week, Westport sponsored a Family Math and Science night. Several girls helped set up and then stayed for the event. This photo is of Kevani and DeAndrea playing during a break.....sweet!

This week was out of our normal routine. The girls have a unit test on operations with decimals and percents, so we used this as an intensive group study session.

One of the articles we read in our teacher book study this fall was about the differences in success at a major university of Asian students vs. African American students. These students came into their freshman year with equivalent SATs, high school GPAs, parental support, and motivation. However, the African American students performed much more poorly in their mathematics courses their first year in college than the Asian students. The difference was in how they studied. The African American students studied independently, and when they were stuck, they brought their questions to class. The Asian students also studied independently, but then brought their questions and problems to a study group of their peers. When they went to class, they had already mastered the material thanks to the group interaction and were ready to learn the new material presented by the professor.

I'm trying to help my girls learn to work effectively together and to rely on each others' skill and expertise. This was a start. I set it up as a jigsaw - groups were assigned to master a group of problems, then we regrouped and the girls taught their new group members the problems they knew. Today they were only partly successful - they were very hesitant to work with the girls who are on the other team during the school day. I was surprised by this since we've met weekly for over a month. The positive from the day is that they did practice working in flexible groupings and develop a higher familiarity with the material, and we had one more experience developing trust.

Photos of Karen Stark's room

Meeting #5

It's nice to finally post some pictures of the girls! This was the first time the girls seriously worked on their designs. We talked about how color is associated with mood and attention, and looked at color samples that fit the criteria - calming, peaceful, good for attention - that we want.

While we did some reading on websites about color in the classroom, I found this response to a question about color and autistic children:

"David I have worked many years in color, lighting and design with mentally impaired individuals, and at present a niece that is autistic. What I have found with these individuals, and especially my niece who I have observed from the age of 6 months, is that it takes very little to overstimulate them. Their environment should be very orderly, calm, and monochromatic. Mary a previous post, had mentioned blue and green as being good colors and she is correct, these colors calm, relax, and nuture. But more than these colors, you need to have a LOT of negative (blank) space in these rooms with light neutral colors as Mary suggested. Use bright colors as accent colors in the form of pictures, and/or seasonal display but be careful even with that, don't use very much. Surfaces with strong value contrast, especially flooring, can cause problems; the autistic person sometimes does not see a black and white tiled floor as black and white, but the white tile as the floor and the black tile as a hole and will be afraid to walk on it. The flooring should be close in value and hue to the walls. It has been very enlightening working so closely with my niece and observing her progress."

Meeting #4

A good day to tie up loose ends......

• We worked through samples of rectangles drawn to different scales, finding their areas and perimeters.
• I gave each girl a copy of our consolidated list from two weeks ago following meeting with Jana Underwood. Karen Stark is noting which of those is priorities for her.
• We watched a video and looked at photos of Snoezelen rooms, which are designed to provide sensory stimulation for people with disabilities. The website has a video about halfway down the page on the left: http://www.snoezeleninfo.com/main.asp
• Finally, we finished the scale drawings!!

Meeting #3, January 26, 2009

We turned a corner this week – the girls are getting really excited about what we’re working on and some of them are overflowing with ideas. We had a special guest speaker today, Jana Underwood. She is an occupational therapist for JCPS and serves Westport as one of her schools. Jana was inviting and thoughtful, sharing a wealth of information in a way that the girls understood. She talked to them about universal design and access for students with disabilities. Since we’ve spend part of two afternoons in Ms. Stark’s classroom she talked about the specific issues in her room. These include major obstacles like the post inside the door to things that most of us wouldn’t notice, like the faint flicker of fluorescent light that can be profoundly disturbing to a child with autism. The girls were empathetic, and began identifying the many inconveniences and small changes they might include in their designs. We also talked about some of the technologies that have been developed for students with disabilities.

One of the areas we talked about is the entrance to the building by Ms. Stark’s room. In poor weather, students get off the bus and wait in an area that isn’t covered while the doors to the building are opened. Even in good weather, the area isn’t exactly the most inviting…..it has a lovely view of the dumpsters and the parking lot.

Next we went to Ms. Stark’s room for a tour. Even though we’ve been in the room doing measurements, we haven’t really looked at it through the eyes of the children who spend much of the day there. Ms. Stark identified the amount of visual clutter as a real dilemma and distraction. She needs a large amount of storage for the variety of supplies and texts she uses to individualize instruction, but many of her students are overwhelmed by the stimulation from things like books on shelves, bulletin board displays, and stacks of bins and books along the walls. We talked about her need for a more calming environment, with basic needs like simple closed cabinets that are consistent throughout the room and fabric curtains that can easily be moved to cover and uncover the bulletin boards as she uses them. Her students also need a quiet, more secluded area for self calming. Ms. Stark needs to be able to see into this area for supervision, but it could include a translucent screen from the rest of the room and a variety of textures and fabrics for sensory stimulation.

See the document here that is my compilation of the students’ notes from our talk with Ms. Underwood and Ms. Stark.

Week #2, January 21, 2009

This week we started with a formal lesson on scale factor. Rachel Cox, a 7th grade math teacher at Westport, taught this lesson since scale factor is part of the 7th grade core content. I think it was good for the girls to meet a teacher they will have next year, and they quickly realized that they could apply their 6th grade skills with fractions and decimals to solve scale factor problems.

We also looked at a set real architectural plans of a proposed addition to Pewee Valley Presbyterian Church. We looked at the extraordinary number of layers involved in archictect plans (it's about an inch thick with diagrams from multiple viewpoints and at multiple scales) and we talked about the way scale and proportion are indicated. I have another set of plans to show that are more complex of a science building at Lindsey Wilson College.

After our formal lessons and discussion, we returned to our scale drawings of Ms. Stark's room. She is a gracious host for a group of high energy girls at the end of a long school day. It seemed like they had a much easier time with this task after our work upstairs.

Meeting #1, January 12, 2009

Our first meeting! All of the girls were a little uncertain....it's hard to know what to expect when you first join a new group. I explained that our group has a several goals:

• Create a peer group of strong mathematics students, so that they will be able to support and encourage each other through middle school to achieve academically
• Build lasting friendships between wonderful girls who might not get to know each other in the normal school day
• Explore math through service oriented projects and projects that the girls initiate as they gain more experience working together
• Meet mentors to support them as they move closer to high school, and meet professional women who use math as a part of their daily work
• Become mentors and tutors to girls who are invited to join our group next year as incoming sixth graders

We talked about our first project.....a design for remodelling Ms. Stark's classroom. Ms. Stark teaches students with severe disabilities, so access and accommodations to serve her students are important issues in the physical design of her classroom. This project will likely carry us through the end of the year.

Today I introduced scale drawing, and we set a scale of 6 inches = 1/4 cm for our drawings. We made our first visit to Ms. Stark's room, and worked in teams to start the scale drawings of her room that we'll use as the basis for our designs. It surprised me to see just how challenging this was -- the process of translating the actual measurements to a graph paper drawing of her classroom. The girls also were uncertain how to work as a part of a cohesive group, which may end up being one of the most valuable skills we learn together.