Live Oak Outreach

By Tamra Taylor, Superintendent, Live Oak School District

In this month’s column, I’m going to describe some of the activities we have begun implementing under the Live Oak School District’s “Goal 2: Culture of Learning.” This goal states that all students will regularly be involved in collaborative inquiry-based learning that involves the application of 21st Century skills and that results in a culminating project or event.

In pursuing this goal over the last two years, we have tapped the experience and enthusiasm of John Hayes, a fifth grade teacher at Live Oak Elementary, to shepherd the piloting of the hands-on, inquiry-based FOSS science curriculum*. When John arrived at the Live Oak School District in 2013, he proposed science-language arts integration at Live Oak Elementary. His classroom thus became a pilot demonstration site to show how science could be the context for English language arts (ELA), particularly with vocabulary development and writing with notebooks. Other teachers along with administrators observed his integrated approach, and as a result, we decided to expand the pilot.

In 2014, after deciding to fund summer school for the first time in six years, the district leadership team requested that John develop the fourth, fifth, and sixth grade summer school curriculum program that featured FOSS science and ELA/English language development (ELD) integration, as well as providing the teachers with professional development. District and school administrators visited the summer program to see how science could be the foundation for ELA/ELD and we were very impressed. As a result, we decided to pilot FOSS in three fifth grade classrooms during the 2014-15 school year and are further planning on expanding its use in 2015-16.

In addition to the expansion of FOSS, we are also engaging in another Goal 2 pilot during 2014-15. This Spring features two third grade teachers piloting the use of LEGO Education’s Simple Machines unit as a means of integrating Common Core and Next Generation Science Standards with hands-on learning in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. It is our hope that the LEGO classroom kits will be used during the District-provided summer camp, as well as by additional teachers in 2015-16.

Finally, the District has received a grant from the California Coastal Commission to engage all District fifth grade students in an eight to ten week “project-based learning” unit on coastal and marine environment education in Spring 2016. We look forward to sharing more details about this exciting project as it gets closer.

We know that kids are excited by opportunities to engage in hands-on science and therefore will continue to seek out innovative ways of building exposure to science and 21st Century skills into the school day.

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Adapted with permission from the FOSS Newsletter, Spring 2015, No. 45

*FOSS(r) is developed at the Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California at Berkeley, and published by Delta Education (www.deltaeducation.com). (c) The Regents of the University of California