The Snyder Education Foundation recently presented 10 Snyder ISD teachers with $500 grants to help fund classroom projects.
The foundation board of directors reviewed 23 applications and announced the recipients the day before the Thanksgiving break began.
The recipients were Carolyn Torres and Emily Rollins of Snyder Primary School; Nicole McCurdy and Deborah Morales of Snyder Intermediate School; Christy Rush, Carolyn Botts and Mindi Bredemeyer of Snyder Junior High School; and Wynola Early, Lisa Butler and Scott Clark of Snyder High School.
Torres, who teachers second grade, plans to use the money to provide an educational way to introduce science, technology, engineering, art and math processes through simple STEAM activities.
“Students have a natural curiosity to build. These activities will provide students an innovative way to explore STEAM activities through play and socialization,” she wrote in her grant application. “Students will use materials provided to construct or draw as many different structures as they can. Instead of just being busy, students will be engaged in creative, complex tasks and will be encouraged to think like inventors.”
Rollins, a first grade teacher, will use the money to decorate her room to correspond with the unit she is teaching. She said one unit could involve using items found in a bakery.
“The challenge in education today is keeping students involved while providing rigor. By planning teaching units (such as the bakery unit), my students will be challenged, will be interested and will be more likely to aim for higher academic performance, perhaps without even realizing it,” she wrote in her grant application.
She also wrote that she hopes to “see a decrease in the area of student discipline in the classroom.”
“Since the students will be involved in an uncommon and possibly first-time experience, they will be more inclined to participate,” she wrote.
McCurdy, who teaches fifth grade reading, said she will use the money to purchase art supplies. She wrote in her grant application that the supplies would be more than crayons and markers. She plans to buy oil pastels, paint brushes, sketch paper, sketching pencils, photography printing paper, matting kits and modeling clay that will be used during an art unit.
“I value my time in the classroom with my kids and know that time is precious with much material to cover, but I also know that I am growing individual hearts and minds and that is equally important and why I chose teaching in the first place,” she wrote.
Morales, a fourth grade English/language arts teacher, will use her money to construct a trap room. Students will have to problem-solve as a team to escape the room and use different subjects, including math, science, reading and technology.
“Creating an escape room will challenge our minds as we develop, predict, anticipate, infer and draw conclusions,” she wrote. “It has never been done before at the intermediate level and we will make history by having GT (gifted/talented) students create puzzles, riddles, clues, hints, videos, codes, locked boxes for victims to find and get out in time.”
Rush will use her grant funds to purchase cameras for the yearbook staff.
“My students would be very excited if we had better quality cameras available to them, and with that, I could get them interested in doing a school newspaper,” she wrote in her grant application. “This would give them interesting opportunities to learn journalistic-style writing, which would make them better writers overall.”
Botts will purchase calculators for her 95 seventh grade math students.
“I want to bring the students’ conceptual learning to the forefront of their learning throughout the school year,” she wrote in her grant application.
With her grant, Bredemeyer, an eighth grade science teacher, is also planning to build a trap room.
“Overall my anticipated goal is that my students will become more confident in their abilities to reason through problems and develop logical solutions, become more secure and academically adept in their communication with peers, while building their creativity by extracting skills they may not necessarily know they possess or know how to put to use,” she wrote in the grant application.
Early, a computer science teacher, will use the money to buy two battery power packs and extra parts for the school’s drones.
“The major goal of this grant is to show students how computer programming is very relevant to the world they are living in,” she wrote in her application. “Robotics and drones are a major field of study as well as career opportunities, both in civilian life and in the military. Any time that we can show students real life applications of what they are learning, we have changed their worlds and increased the depth of visions for their lives.”
Lisa Butler, who teaches marketing, will buy supplies to make T-shirts and posters that will be sold at the high school.
“This will give us the start-up funds needed in order to become a self-sufficient, student-operated business within the school,” she wrote in her application. “It also fits seamlessly with the entrepreneurship course, as well as the other marketing courses. Having a student-operated print shop can provide students with on-campus internships to gain workforce ready skills.”
Clark, who teaches honors life science classes, will use the grant to purchase lab activities that “will foster scientific growth and experimental research experience for students in advanced life science sources at Snyder High School.”
“Students who participate in lab activities purchased through this grant will gain access to a national competition called ‘Genes in Space’ that has sent student projects to the International Space Station to address significant human issues faced while living in space for long durations, similar to those experienced by Scott Kelly.”
“Being new to the foundation board, I had never experienced the grant announcements. What a great experience to see the teachers and students so excited,” said board president Bill Crist. “The projects that these grants have helped pay for over the years are great examples of our teachers thinking creatively and our students having opportunities for hands-on learning experiences that go way beyond ‘teaching for the test.’”
The Snyder Education Foundation provides classroom grants for Snyder ISD teachers and scholarships for graduating seniors at all three of Scurry County’s public schools. More information is available online at www.snyderedfoundation.org.