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Meet our teacher mentors from across the country!
ePALS is very pleased to have been joined by the following teacher mentors:
Don't miss the chance to see what members asked about space exploration and the Design Challenges. Visit the Space Day Talk discussion board. |
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Maureen is a fifth grade teacher in Suffield Elementarty, in N.E. Ohio. She has had several teams accept the "Challenge" during the past two years. As a fifth grade teacher in a state with mandated proficiency testing in grades 4 and 6, it is her responsibility to initiate interventions which enable all students to pass these tests in sixth grade. Enthusiasm for the Space Day Challenges and hands-on experimentation has worked for her students! Passage rates have exceeded the norm, and brought them to second place in the county. Each year has been a learning experience for Maureen as well. A parent helped enter student solutions two years ago, and she managed to do it herself last year. Entire families were caught up in the enthusiasm of the students, and community relations grew stronger in the process.
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Maria has been an educator for 10 years, mostly in the elementary grades. During the last two years, she has been a home-school mom, and a public health educator. Last year, the Space Day project was a great opportunity for the home school group to work together, and they will be doing it again this year with her home-schooled 10th grade son.
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Cherryl is in her twentieth year of teaching and all of her experience has come in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex. Her experience with Design Challenge taught her, as well as her class teams, much about incorporating technology into the written, mathematical, and thought processes. The students realized this was a cross-curriculum effort, applied skills to logical thinking, used their knowledge in technology, and learned how to produce a product as a group effort.
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With an undergraduate degree in business management and two children, Marty decided to go back to school for a Masters in Elementary Education. This is her third year of teaching and her third year of doing the Space Day project. The first year that she did the project, she had great success with 4 teams being named 'stellar solutions' and one honorable mention. The second year, last year, she had two teams named 'stellar solutions'.
Marty teaches in a departmentalized 5th grade setting with approximatelty 120 students. Her school district, Lackawanna Trail, is a small rural district in Northeastern Pennsylvania. ePALS is one of her favorite parts of the project!
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Corrine is a homeschool mom, with two sons aged 9 and 11. They LOVE space - they eat and drink and speak space; they play space, they read about space, and they talk about space. As their teacher, I try to find ways to focus their knowledge and energy into learning experiences that will challenge their logic and imagination. I have found that working on a Space Day Challenge does just that! Last year, their design for the Stretch and Fetch Challenge was chosen as one of the twelve Stellar Solutions! Needless to say, they have been waiting with baited breath for the announcement of this year's challenges!
I look forward to helping other educators, whether they're teaching at home or school.
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Rosemary teaches web design/computer technology at Millenium Middle School, a fine arts magnet school in Orlando, Fl. She won a Disney Teacherrific award for her "Backstage at Millenium", a web site that links elementary students to students in the middle grades at Millenium.
She likes to use Space as a catalyst to get her students excited about using the Internet to gather data. The Space Day Design Challenges are the perfect way to do this. The students research the challenges and with ePALS, the students can add to their research by posting queries on electronic bulletin boards that have had NASA engineers as guest experts. Her students also found peers to complete the Space Day Design Challenges in Estonia by looking up classrooms registered with ePALS.
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