The gym was abuzz with 8th graders touring each other's handmade exhibits.  Students discussed what was happening in each tableau and decided together what was the message to take away. Ms. Hon, Ms. Styles, and Mr. Reddig facilitated the showcase and quizzed students while visiting teachers were amazed. Take a look at some of the work below.

Related Posts:
http://piedmontpd.weebly.com/celebrating-piedmont/2-distinguished-guests
​
http://piedmontpd.weebly.com/celebrating-piedmont/civil-rights-gymnasium

http://piedmontpd.weebly.com/celebrating-piedmont/students-build-a-civil-rights-museum

Making is at the core of Piedmont's culture  WE MAKE SO MUCH, IT'S HARD TO HYPERLINK IT ALL!​

Every day is #GlobalMakerDay at Piedmont! Well, maybe not EVERY day, but it IS extremely rare to walk the halls of Piedmont and not see students planning or building something across the curriculum and at all grade levels. Students are even making and creating during standardized test times, the time usually known as the least creative of the year.

Making is a given in our interdisciplinary passion projects, in Ms. Newburger's excellent Library Makerspace,  in clubs, and in encore classes like Art, Band, Drama and Orchestra, but what makes me love Piedmont so much is how common it is in our core classes as well!

Consider Mr. O'Neill this week alone, from spears to swans his students were making. Props to him and all to the Individuals and Societies teachers whose students recently built their own tools when studying the stone age. They then created marketing campaigns for the tools and sold them to classmates.

The Social Studies classroom  making tradition continues in the upper grades as students design build earthquake resistant structures and make period costumes living history exhibits, industrial revolution inventions (yet more industrial revolution),  civil rights museums, (another Civil Rights museum) etc.

Teachers model making at Piedmont. Mr. Egnot models this by transforming his classroom into a war zone of WW1 trenches and the media center yearly through his maker skills and Ms. Frilot transforms her classroom to a poetry cafe with soft lighting, colors, and seating.

In World Language and Language Arts classes, students write songs for the Harlem Renaissance, compile playists and record their own podcasts,  design and build whirligigs (both with wood, and with minecraft redstone)and recreate setting layouts and film their own movies based on their novel studies. They make culture clusters that make manifest their own poems.

In Math, students make large and small designs for the famous Scale Model Project. They also create their own board games and of course there's the yearly giant Prism-palooza! 

In Science, they design their best protective egg case then test it out by catapulting the egg using a homemade catapult.

What does this culture of making lead to? It leads to kids who think creatively and make for special occasions and for no reason at all! They spend their free time building and making everything from towers to ASMR videos.

Stay tuned for more as we celebrate active learning and creating today and every day at #PiedmontIB.  Send me your photos and videos if I don't happen by!

At Piedmont we are big proponents of experiential learning. from recreating (safely) wars and revolutions in individuals and socieities classes, to walking field trips of Uptown historic and modern business sites,  Piedmont students learn by doing. In math they don't just study prisms, they build them, blow them up and go inside. In science, they don't just study heat and geothermal activity on the earth, they make smores to exerience it. 

Here are a few recent examples of special events our teachers created for their students:

Thanks to Ms. Styles and Mr. Reddig, the 8th graders spent the days before Winter break learning about a topic that will help them for the rest of their lives. The teachers arranged a two day participatory experiential lesson in finance from the experts at Wells Fargo.  Students learned about timelines, what you can and can't control,  how quickly money goes when you are an adult, and how to guard yourself from unexpectd setbacks. 

Thanks to Ms. Swift and 6th grade math team for inviting in a Piedmont parent and finance expert to be a guest speaker to 6th graders. Money math in real life, and a good lesson about the way debt can spiral out of control. Here are a few photos from that event. 

Thanks to Mr. Chandler, Ms. Hash, and Ms Tapia for the Titanic in the Gym event where 6th graders used their knowledge of math and reading to stay afloat. I heard only a few survived but everyone enjoyed the chance to compete and cooperate in the multi-class  simulation!

Thanks to Ms. Kryszak and the 6th grade team for organizing a trip to see the new release film of the summer reading blockbuster novel Wonder.  Students enjoyed seeing the book come to life on the big screen almost as much as the popcorn and having the theater to ourselves! They were able to cheer for the heros and boo the villains together and also learn a little about the importance of empathy for those who are different from ourselves.

Thanks to Mr. Carpenter, students were able to go with their Career and Technical Education classmates to the 2017 Geek Fest. Students loved being on a college campus. They attended lectures on Minecraft and Movie Making, toured a high tech automotive center, and particpated in hands on tech sessions like:

I don't have photos of this year's leadership trip to Queen's University, or drama's trip to see the high school play, so please understand this is only a small slice of the work teachers here to do make learning real every day.

​Related Posts:

• http://piedmontpd.weebly.com/celebrating-piedmont/holocaust-survivor-visits-piedmont-to-speak
• Piedmont Smooth
• Distinguish Guests
• Banking Titan Visits Us
• Civil Rights Gymnasium
• Whirligig Example of Maker Movement in Education
• 7th Grade Living History Museum
• 8th grade Civil War Simulation )
• 8th Graders Make a Civil Rights Museum
• Let Students Show You New Ways to Teach (Desmos for Math in Ms. Callahan's room)
• 6th Grade Museum of Religious Tolerance
• Holocaust Survivor Speaks to Piedmont 7th Grade
• http://piedmontpd.weebly.com/celebrating-piedmont/students-build-a-civil-rights-museum
• http://piedmontpd.weebly.com/celebrating-piedmont/2-distinguished-guests
• piedmontpd.weebly.com/lesson-ideas/bring-content-to-life-through-dramatization
• http://piedmontpd.weebly.com/celebrating-piedmont/gods-and-goddesses-of-piedmont
• http://piedmontpd.weebly.com/celebrating-piedmont/7th-grade-brings-history-to-life Living History Museum
• http://piedmontpd.weebly.com/celebrating-piedmont/7th-grade-video-stars includes a WWI reenactment experience
• http://piedmontpd.weebly.com/celebrating-piedmont/piedmont-teachers-gamify-social-studies
• http://piedmontpd.weebly.com/celebrating-piedmont/hi-tech-art-instruction 
• http://piedmontpd.weebly.com/celebrating-piedmont/6th-grade-active-learning
• http://piedmontpd.weebly.com/celebrating-piedmont/holocaust-remembrance-day-at-piedmont
• 
  

If you'd like to learn more about Piedmont's curricular and extracurricular offerings, watch these clips from this week's Curriculum Day event.

You'll learn about IB grading, Service in Action, Math, Science, Social Studies, Language Arts, World Languages, Art, Music, CTE, Drama, a few of our many clubs and contests, as well as information about upcoming events including the Orchestra concert, school play, and international travel meeting.

This is just a small peek at a few of the great things we do every day here at Piedmont so contact your teachers or Ms. Gurthie if you want to know more.