Greetings from LEARN NC! Happy Fall! We hope you are taking time to enjoy the beautiful leaves, carving pumpkins, and eating yummy treats! The school year is flying by and we have the resources you need to keep things moving along. Don’t forget you can always keep up with us on Twitter and Facebook for the latest LEARN NC news!
LEARN NC’s 2012 election guide
The presidential election is less than two weeks away, and LEARN NC has the resources you need to bring this important event into your classroom with our 2012 election guide. The guide includes information about national, state, and local elections. It provides an extensive list of online resources describing candidates and parties, campaign issues, and election law. Lesson plans and activities address topics such as satire, propaganda, the use of statistics, and the constitutional foundations of the electoral process. If you know of any valuable resources we should add, email Kimberly Hirsh, Managing Editor.
Teaching the election with the Mini Page Archive
We recently published three resources to help teachers use the Mini Page Archive to teach election history and process. The Mini Page Archive, available through the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill libraries, digitally preserves a weekly newspaper feature targeted mainly at children, their parents, and educators. The archive includes issues published from 1969 to 2007. LEARN NC’s Mini Page Archive election resources include a guide for elementary teachers and two lesson plans for middle and high school teachers, “Presidential Elections and American Culture” and “Making Inferences about the 2000 Presidential Election.”
School of Education hosts conversation about education in the presidential election
LEARN NC has partnered with the UNC School of Education to host the brown bag event, “Our Generation, Our Nation, Our Education, Our Conversation” on October 30, 2012 at 12 pm in 206 Peabody Hall on UNC’s campus. This event is free and open to the public. To register for the event, visit http://tinyurl.com/9tnk9k7.
Common Core and NC Essential Standards support
Are you struggling to understand the Common Core? We’ve published a guide to the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics for elementary school. This guide provides resources for teachers, administrators, and parents to help them understand the content and intent of the standards, their impact on teaching and learning, and how students will be assessed on these standards. The guide explains the importance of Critical Areas to the Standards and includes an interactive graphic showing the relationship between the Critical Areas and the Domains across grades K-5.
Do you need resources for implementing the new Common Core and North Carolina Essential Standards? You can browse the standards on our website. To find lesson plans and other resources aligned to a particular standard, click the “Find aligned resources” link under the text of the standard.
Coming soon: The Walking Classroom
The Walking Classroom is an award-winning, nationally recognized, in-school fitness initiative and obesity intervention that improves health literacy and builds core content knowledge while addressing different learning styles. The method is quite simple: Students take brisk 20-minute walks (preferably outside) while listening to specially written and recorded content which is aligned to the Common Core State Standards. Detailed lesson plans contain defined objectives, discussion questions, and comprehension quizzes for each educational podcast, so that when students return from their walk, the content can be effectively reviewed and synthesized. LEARN NC will publish a sampler of ten podcasts with their accompanying lesson plans and quizzes. Stay tuned for the announcement when the sampler is published! For more information, visit The Walking Classroom’s website.
Fall online professional development still open
LEARN NC’s fall online professional development courses are still accepting new enrollments. We are offering courses for our Carolina On-line Teacher (COLT) program as well as Moodle training, content-area courses, and courses designed to help teachers work with special populations. As always, each course was created using a researched model of effective professional development and the online format allows participants to work at a time and place most convenient to them. All courses are aligned to the North Carolina Professional Teaching Standards.
LEARN NC at SERMACS
LEARN NC graduate assistant Eldrin Deas will lead a group of science teachers as they live-tweet the 2012 Southeastern Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society. Look for further details on how you can follow these teachers’ experience in our next newsletter, on Twitter, and on Facebook.
This month’s Twitter chat: Juan Carillo & Mexican-Origin Scholarship Boys
LEARN NC (@LearnNC) will host our second monthly Twitter chat on October 29, from 4-5pm. Professor Juan Carrillo (@CarrilloJFC) will lead the conversation. The chat will focus on his work Portraits of Mexican-Origin Scholarship Boys and “making-it,” intellectual masculinities, the gender gap in education, and the strategies used by Latino “ghetto nerds” to succeed academically all while affirming a hybrid cultural identity. Join the chat by using the hashtag #learnchat.
Listen with LEARN NC
Did you know that there’s a LEARN NC podcast? Each week we share information about how to use our site, our ongoing projects, and special events in the North Carolina educational community. Listen to the latest podcast by downloading it from iTunes U and subscribe so that you’ll never miss an installment.
Keep in touch
To keep up with all of LEARN NC’s exciting work, be sure to follow us on Twitter and like us on Facebook. We’ll keep you updated on our projects, share exciting news and trends in education, and give you the opportunity to participate in our Weekly Trivia Contest! Winners will be entered into a drawing to receive a free online professional development course.