2004 GRANTS AWARDED: $41,418

$7,000
Reading Connections between School and Home
Lake View Elementary School

This project will provide funds to implement a school-home program for beginning readers, struggling readers, and ELL students. Beginning reader books, books-on-tapes, and Spanish beginning books will be purchased to check out to provide extra, successful practice at home with parents. Parents will be trained in the home reading program (both English and Spanish). This project is creative in the ways it addresses the coordination of the school reading program with the need for parental support of emerging and struggling readers. It supports reading together at home through increased access to reading materials in the home, offers the child a positive, successful reading experience with their parents at home, allows parents to be supportive in a non-threatening role as listener, and honors the families first language as an asset in learning to read.

$2,000
Standards-Based 8th Grade Exit Project
Whitehorse Middle School

This project is to develop an integrated 8th grade exit project that demonstrates mastery of the Wisconsin and MMSD middle school technology standards in accordance with NCLB. Students will prove proficiency by designing a web page that includes graphics and animations. This is a high interest project that allows students to develop their own parameters within a given framework of requirements that is designed to accommodate students with various needs and abilities. The software being requested is appropriate for students at all levels of interest and abilities. The project will eventually become the eighth grade computer technology curriculum at White horse.

$5,240
West African Drumming
Mendota Elementary School

The West African Drumming Residency will teach students the skills of drumming, focusing and listening, strengthen their rhythmic abilities, expose them to an African culture, and increase their sense of community. It is hoped that these skills, learned through drumming in a disciplined group, will generalize to other classrooms and subjects. With 54% of Mendota's population being African American, the focus on one of Africa's great art forms cannot help but add to the self esteem of the African American students and to create respect and appreciation by non Black students.

$8,680
School Yard Treasure
Frank Allis Elementary School

This project would create a focused plan for systematic, long-term development and integration of Outdoor Learning Areas in its school yard into the academic curriculum. It is critical that children form some attachment and sense of appreciation for the natural world if they are expected to become adults who feel a sense of responsibility and stewardship toward that world. Only through direct experience can enough knowledge and understanding be gained to encourage students to pursue sustainable lifestyles that will preserve some natural world for generations to follow. In the classroom, outdoor learning offers unlimited opportunities for authentic inquiry-based instruction especially in math and science. In the community, two of the three neighborhoods that Allis serves are bussed. The School Yard Treasure provides valuable opportunities to bring families together for outdoor learning-related activities.

$10,000
Aircraft Construction Experience Project
Memorial High School

Students will construct a full-scale aircraft from raw materials. The aircraft will be constructed under the guidance of a teacher, Experimental Aircraft Association Technical Counselor, and FAA Certified Airframe and Power plant mechanics. Students will develop realistic solutions to authentic science and engineering problems while they experience the time, energy, effort, and quality consciousness required to create a useful product. This is intended to challenge their notion of a "disposable" world. The sale of the finished aircraft will finance the continuation of the endeavor.

$2,880
On-Site Rain Garden to Monitor and Control Run-off
Spring Harbor Middle School

The garden would be used to monitor the change in water quality when rain passes through the garden and determine which native plants are best suited to reducing non-point source pollution. As an environmental science middle school, students and teachers at Spring Harbor are committed to finding solutions to local problems. The garden will provide them with a multitude of research questions about run-off, sediments, vegetation, biodiversity, architecture, water quality, and land use planning.

$1,618
Restoration of the Toke/ORE School Woods and Outdoor Class
Toki Middle School

This project would restore three acres of woods between Toki and Orchard Ridge Elementary by removing the overgrowth of alien species, restoring the prairie area, building an outdoor classroom council ring and updating the trails for handicap accessibility. While doing this, students actively learn about the woodland and prairie habitat and environmental stewardship. Study of Full Options Science Systems "Populations and Ecosystems" is complemented with this Schoolyard Science immersion project.

$4,000
Peaceful Playground
Emerson Elementary School

The community has identified the need to design a playground that makes available to students a variety of games and activities that are fun, safe, and stimulating. The program stresses the development of social skills, conflict resolution skills, and positive interactions among students. The plan will provide all staff and students with a common language and set of behaviors that are part of a positive, healthy, safe school environment. It will also work to increase parent and community involvement at Emerson. Peaceful Playground is a unique response to violence in schools. Implemented school wide it will instill responsibility and conflict resolution skills that transcend from the playground to the classroom, the home and the community.

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