The SMART table is on casters and can easily be moved between classrooms for easy set-up. It also comes with the SMART Table Toolkit that helps teachers create a variety of lessons and monitor student use.  Teachers can create their own lessons to fit the needs of their students. Some activities used include rhyming words, sorting, adding/subtracting, counting and beginning sounds.

What makes this a useful teaching tool is that the SMART Table compliments other SMART products that are currently using at Eisenhower already, such as the SMART Board and SMART Clickers, allowing teachers to differentiate their lessons using small group activities for interventions and extensions. SMART Table lessons allow students to communicate, collaborate and come to consensus to find the correct answer. The SMART Table will not let the students advance to the next problem unless the entire group has the correct answer.

The SMART Table enriches the educational experience because it is highly motivational. Students can’t wait to get a chance to use it! Children love technology and with the SMART Table they don’t realize that they are learning because they are having so much fun. Additionally, because of its nature, the SMART Table encourages communication and collaboration which is not the case with other forms of technology.

How will these grants impact your school or your children? Check out the EFW Grant Summaries link to learn more about this year's grants.

The EFW continues to work toward enriching the learning experience for Wauwatosa students. We ask for your continued support by donating money, volunteering time, participating in the "Early Release Bowling" program every Wednesday, or attending one of our fundraising events (Walk/Run and Black & White Catered Affair).

With the goal of strengthening the reading comprehension of students at Madison Elementary School by increasing understanding and awareness of reading comprehension skills and strategies, Angie Kolanko and Lynn Misirian were awarded a $3,261.00 EFW Grant. With the funds provided by the grant, they purchased classroom library books and created a take home collection of the same books with a resource guide for parents and students to check out. The take home materials allow parents to reinforce the reading comprehension skills and strategies that are taught in the classroom.

In addition to creating this new collection of books, parents were invited to an after-school kick-off event in early October 2012 where they received background knowledge and explicit modeling of the comprehension skills and strategies. The Madison Parent-Teacher Association helped to promote this academic focused event and provided treats in order to bring in parents who typically did not attend other PTA events. The parent library collection resides on a cart in the school’s main lobby so that parents can quickly access the materials.

As of January 2, 2013, 25 different families have used this resource. Some have used it on a regular basis since it was introduced. One parent commented, “Both my children (grades 1 and 3) read above their grade level and have large vocabularies, and they both read at home quite a bit every day, so it was a big surprise to me when they started having difficulties with their reading homework and schoolwork. Even though they can read a book easily and quickly, they seem to be having trouble analyzing text. Picking out the main idea, determining the author’s purpose, or making predictions all seem simple and obvious to me, but my kids really struggle. It’s been a great benefit to our family to have the Parent Library available for browsing after school. I love the 'cheat sheet' that comes with the book and gives suggestions for questions I can ask before, during, and after reading a book with them. Some questions I thought they would have been able to answer easily have turned out to be quite a challenge for them. It’s really given me insight into what my children are thinking while they’re reading, and given me ideas for how to follow up with their teachers.”

One perfect example of the benefits of using technology in the classroom can be illustrated in the Wauwatosa High Schools. Advanced Placement Psychology teachers, Nicole Vitrano of Wauwatosa East and Andy Zietlow of Wauwatosa West, received a $2,828 EFW grant to optimize the usefulness of iPad technology while enhancing curriculum. EFW grant funding allowed for the purchase of applications such as Psych Test Hero, Brain Mnemonics, Popplet and Track-n-Share which allow students to review content in a way that utilizes visual and auditory content.

In addition, these apps also provide some quizzes which give students immediate feedback on what content they know and understand and what they still need to study. Track-n-Share is a great way for students to track the amount of sleep they get, their mood, caffeine intake, and stress levels. This is a useful tool for students to look for correlations.

Vitrano says that the benefits of these apps as a learning tool is to provide an additional opportunity for students to interact with the content. The review apps are very helpful as students need to take 4 cumulative exams for this course. Popplet allows students to integrate knowledge from all the units they've studied to find similarities and patterns that fit the different psychological perspectives.

The interactive nature of technology and apps keeps students actively engaged in the learning process and reinforces the content being taught in the classroom. The amount of applications available and easy accessibility means they will most likely be a tool that teachers continue to use in years to come.

Word work is not a new idea. In fact, the Treasures program, which the Wauwatosa School District currently uses, gives suggestions for word work activities which the students could do while the teacher is meeting with small groups of children. However, the materials for these word work centers are often not provided with the curriculum. Additionally, the ideas are not always differentiated and often meet the needs of only a small group of children in the classroom. Furthermore, one of the district's 2012 goals is differentiation for all students. This grant allowed implementation of word work activiites where all learners are engaged at their individual levels. For example, "approaching" students can be sorting small toy objects into beginning sounds tubs while "beyond" students use blends and diagraphs unifix cubes to build words that have blends or diagraphs at the end.

All of the students have made tremendous gains in only the first few months of school. Susan Madden, a parent of a Washington Elementary kindergartener observes, “As an educator I understand the importance of connecting listening, speaking, reading and writing. As a parent it’s been fantastic to see these skills coming together in Olive’s K-5 experience. Her capacity to read and write have grown exponentially during the first four months of school. Not only is she able to read sight words, she can write them as well. She is also developing the ability to sound out chunks of bigger words. I can see her transferring what she knows about reading words while writing and vise versa. And best of all, she loves the process. I am confident she will leave the school year with secure reading and writing strategies.”

Students are not only writing during writer’s workshop but throughout their school day. Students are writing letters in the post office, using block letters to write words in the block center and writing shopping lists in the house center. Student’s see themselves as writers. They have increased their knowledge of letters and their sounds as evidenced in the Junior Kindergarten Treasures alphabet assessment. As of January, twenty-two out of thirty-six students are already able to identify 18 or more uppercase letters. The goal is to identify all twenty-six uppercase letters by the end of the school year.

Joel Marinan, Senior Kindergarten teacher, commented, “Even children at a very young age appear to understand and apply the purpose of written text to communicate with one another.  With your new centers the children are authentically engaged as they write and deliver notes in your post office.”

A $1000 EFW grant was awarded to Carrie Streiff-Stuessy and Donna Koeble of Washington Elementary. The trade book collection has been enhanced in order to more effectively implement new vocabulary, additional genres and multi-cultural themes. Students will utilize the new books in small group Literature Circles and during independent reading time in the classroom. The texts selected for this grant will directly assist in addressing the Reading Common Core Standards for 4th grade in relation to Vocabulary Acquistion and Use.

WILD (Wauwatosa Is Learning Differently) is an outdoor learning environment providing a living laboratory for year-round activities for Wilson/WSTEM students, the district and surrounding communities. This living laboratory provides an interactive, innovative outdoor classroom, close to school, that supports what research has proven – students better retain math, science, language arts, and other skills that incorportate their environment and use of all senses. To date, the students of the WSTEM have utilized the outdoor classroom to do the following activities:

1. Research reports including, Will There Ever be Fish in the Honey Creek Parkway?, History of the Honey Creek, and Bats and Birds of Wisconsin.
2. Purchased bat and bird houses to be erected on the site.
3. Water quality testing of the Honey Creek. Partnered with Marquette University to have them run water testing samples from the Honey Creek.
4. Worked with Jim Ciha from the Milwaukee County Parks Department on plant and tree identification, planning for signs for the outdoor classroom, and implementation of next steps in the building and development process.
5. A group of students from the WSTEM went in front of the Milwaukee County Parks Department to give a presentation to their board about our outdoor classroom and to ask for permission to begin building the classroom and this permission was granted over the winter break.
6. Developed a web page that students will be able to add their research results onto.

EFW grants are enhancing the learning experience for Wauwatosa students. According to Maggie DeTrempe K-1 Teacher, WSTEM, "Project WILD has been a great learning experience for the K-1 group. The kids have really enjoyed learning from Mr. Jim Ciha who has been collaborating on the project. They have learned about the plants and different types of animals that live in our environment, that there are plants living here that are not indigenous, and about the creek and how the flood changed the area around the creek. They are excited to break ground and get building."

Both 6th and 8th grade students are utilizing the microscopes this year. In 6th grade they have been studying light and how it reflects or scatters off of surfaces depending on the smoothness of the surface.  The students looked at objects with the naked eye that appears to be smooth but when examined under the microscope they saw that it was really an uneven surface. In the biology unit they will use them to look at hair follicles of humans versus animals and will also use them to look at cellular differences.

8th grade used the microscopes to look at different types of cells. They made prepared slides of an onion, their own cheek cell, and a plant leaf. They looked at both plant and animal cells to determine what the differences are between them. The microscopes can also be used for the DNA/heredity unit.

Titles such as: “Children’s Dictionary of Occupations”, “When I Grow Up”, “Whose Hat Is This?”, and “When I Grow Up” have been purchased. With the addition of these books all students at each elementary building have access to career books. This connects with the district counseling program goal and district goal to reach every student, be comprehensive in scope, preventative in design and developmental in nature.