Schools
Lincoln Ave. Second Grade Class Presents for Pearl River School Board [VIDEO]
Devin Stone's second grade class at Lincoln Avenue Elementary School showed the board how they use technology in their Fundations program
Toys and clothes can take a backseat for now. This holiday season the gift all the kids are really begging their parents for is a SMART Board.
Perhaps it is an exaggeration to say all children are asking for the interactive white board used in classrooms, but some definitely are, including Devin Stone’s second grade class at Lincoln Avenue Elementary School in Pearl River.
At the Pearl River School District Board of Education meeting Tuesday night, Stone asked her students how many of them wanted a SMART Board for the holidays, and all of them raised their hands.
“Anything with the SMART Board they love. They want to learn from it,” Stone said. “I try to incorporate it into as many lessons as I can because it will always keep their attention. I have to sometimes make them move away from the board because they always want to use it.”
This led Stone to start using the SMART Board and other technology in the classroom during lessons in her class’ Fundations program, which is the reading program students at the school are in from kindergarten to third grade. This year is Stone’s first teaching second grade after teaching fourth, so she was looking for ways to work herself into the program.
One way she uses technology in the program is in conjunction with tile boxes. These are boxes with tiles in them, and each tile has a different letter or combination letters on it. Stone tells the class a word, they sound it out and then spell it. While each student works on his or her tile box, Stone has the same tiles on the computer and projects them to the front of the class so she can work along with them.
“What’s good about it is that I can keep the words up there after we’ve spelled them, opposed to the kids, who have to reuse the tiles each time because the boxes only have so many tiles,” Stone said. “So this way, they can see the patterns in all the words we’ve been spelling to teach them about whatever rule we’re learning about that day.”
Stone said that when she was in school, a lot of learning to read was just remembering how different words are spelled, but this works better because the kids are spelling the words out.
Stone and some of her students were at the Board of Education meeting Tuesday night to make a presentation to about how they’ve been using the technology. Stone said another teacher suggested to her she and some students make a presentation as part of her teacher evaluation.
“I thought it was a good idea,” she said. “These are the people who approve all the different technology we get, so I thought it’d be nice to let them see how it works.”
