HOLM ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
(CSU 2nd Placement)
SETTING AND CONTEXT
Demographic Details:
Holm Elementary School is located in Denver, Colorado and is part of Denver Public School. Its mission is to honor, appreciate, and support students of diverse backgrounds to create a safe and positive community. There are currently 512 students enrolled at Holm. 53% of the students are Hispanic, 19% are African-American, and 16% are Caucasian. 81% of the students have free and reduced lunch. Though no specific percentages were listed on any reputable websites, Holm has a very large immigrant population. This population consists of students from Belarus, Russia, Puerto Rico, Libya, Syria, Sudan, and Mongolia. Though Holm Elementary School is a neighborhood school for K-5 students, it is a choice school for early childhood education (ECE) students. ECE to third grade classes are split so ESL students can work closely with Spanish-speaking teachers. There are about twenty-five teachers employed at Holm Elementary School.
Holm Elementary School is located in Denver, Colorado and is part of Denver Public School. Its mission is to honor, appreciate, and support students of diverse backgrounds to create a safe and positive community. There are currently 512 students enrolled at Holm. 53% of the students are Hispanic, 19% are African-American, and 16% are Caucasian. 81% of the students have free and reduced lunch. Though no specific percentages were listed on any reputable websites, Holm has a very large immigrant population. This population consists of students from Belarus, Russia, Puerto Rico, Libya, Syria, Sudan, and Mongolia. Though Holm Elementary School is a neighborhood school for K-5 students, it is a choice school for early childhood education (ECE) students. ECE to third grade classes are split so ESL students can work closely with Spanish-speaking teachers. There are about twenty-five teachers employed at Holm Elementary School.
Culture and Community Context:
Despite the large multicultural student population, most students above the age of seven had conversational English and understood instructions delivered in English. ESL students between the ages of three and seven needed a lot more differentiated support to understand instruction. This meant repeating instructions in Spanish and writing down important terms in English/Spanish translations on the board.
Parent involvement was very high at Holm. A handful of parents worked as paras in the Kindergarten and first grade classes. Parent volunteers were welcomed to observe and participate in classes with the students. Parents (both men and women) delivered their kids to school in the morning if they did not have immediate work responsibilities. Teachers also valued building close rapport with immigrant parents to make them feel welcomed. Multicultural family structures played a big role on student behavior. There were a large amount of students that confessed to having a parent (particularly a father) absent in the family picture, a parent that was involved in gang activity, or a parent that was incarcerated for a gang-related crime. Students that came from a middle-eastern background had parents that made requests for instructional accommodations based on their cultural values (like not assigning homework on weekends for religious studies work and segregating students based on gender). Teachers reported that students who did not have a father in the picture, had an unstructured family situation, or came from a culture with a strong gender bias were more likely to demonstrate disruptive behavior in the classroom.
The biggest event that Holm Elementary School hosted during the year was Multicultural Night, which happens each year in early November. This provided students, faculty, parents, and other individuals in the community to celebrate the student population's diverse cultural background. All classroom teachers select a country or region that they study the month before. Visual and performing arts teachers are expected to create assignments that alight with each grade's country. Other aspects of the event include a pot luck and a fashion show, where students get to wear their native attire and walk on a runway. This is Holm Elementary School's most beloved event.
Despite the large multicultural student population, most students above the age of seven had conversational English and understood instructions delivered in English. ESL students between the ages of three and seven needed a lot more differentiated support to understand instruction. This meant repeating instructions in Spanish and writing down important terms in English/Spanish translations on the board.
Parent involvement was very high at Holm. A handful of parents worked as paras in the Kindergarten and first grade classes. Parent volunteers were welcomed to observe and participate in classes with the students. Parents (both men and women) delivered their kids to school in the morning if they did not have immediate work responsibilities. Teachers also valued building close rapport with immigrant parents to make them feel welcomed. Multicultural family structures played a big role on student behavior. There were a large amount of students that confessed to having a parent (particularly a father) absent in the family picture, a parent that was involved in gang activity, or a parent that was incarcerated for a gang-related crime. Students that came from a middle-eastern background had parents that made requests for instructional accommodations based on their cultural values (like not assigning homework on weekends for religious studies work and segregating students based on gender). Teachers reported that students who did not have a father in the picture, had an unstructured family situation, or came from a culture with a strong gender bias were more likely to demonstrate disruptive behavior in the classroom.
The biggest event that Holm Elementary School hosted during the year was Multicultural Night, which happens each year in early November. This provided students, faculty, parents, and other individuals in the community to celebrate the student population's diverse cultural background. All classroom teachers select a country or region that they study the month before. Visual and performing arts teachers are expected to create assignments that alight with each grade's country. Other aspects of the event include a pot luck and a fashion show, where students get to wear their native attire and walk on a runway. This is Holm Elementary School's most beloved event.
School-Wide Policies:
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Yellow=Verbal Warning Orange= Warning in the form of time-out with another teacher an/or support staff Red= Parent Contact, action required |
- Safe Schools: Holm Elementary School follows the Safe Schools Policy training when it comes to crisis intervention. Each month, students practice a lockout drill, lockdown drill, fire drills, tornado drills, or bus evacuation drills. All threats against school, staff, or students will be immediately reported to the dean, counselor, principal, social worker, police officer, or any relevant party. Local law enforcement is constantly on campus and involved with all drills and threats.
- Conflict Resolution: All students that have issues to process (family, teachers, schoolwork, peer bullying, etc.) talk to the social workers and school psychologists in the "Husky Den." Behavioral discipline also happens in the Husky Den, such as detention and consequences for inappropriate behaviors. While some students value going to the Husky Den to work out issues with other students or to take a brain break, other students get negatively triggered by the mention of the Husky Den and adamantly protest not going there. Teachers have also noted that some students prefer to be in the Husky Den over being in class because of the some of the sensory toys, games, and other resources they can use to avoid homework. Therefore, teachers prefer not to send students to the Husky Den unless it is an emergency. There are also a few students that demonstrate aggressive behavior towards other students due to social challenges and sensory overwhelm. When this occurs, social workers, school psychologists, special educators, and some administrators will get involved to physically restrain the child. Teachers and students are not allowed to get involved with this process.
- Students with Special Needs: The 1973 Rehabilitation Act requires that schools in Denver Public Schools (including Holm Elementary School) locate, evaluate, and determine if students are qualified for 504 plans or IEPs. The Family Education Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) give parents the right to review relevant educational records. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act of 2004 guarantees that students between the ages of 3 and 21 with a disability is assured public education in the least restrictive environment at no cost to the parents. Special education teachers and social workers are in frequent contact with parents about their child's behavior during school relevant to IEP evaluations. Teachers are encouraged to document positive and negative behavior aligned with the IEP to tweak it. Special education students attend specials classes with ECE students. See the conflict resolution section for dealing with aggressive behavior.
Classroom Environment and Art Classes Taught:
I taught art in grades ECE-5 with the visual arts teacher. Despite not having an endorsement in ECE, faculty at CSU and Holm agreed that it would be appropriate for me to have the experience teaching this group. In addition to assisting my mentor teacher with instruction for the multicultural night projects, I taught a Halloween themed lesson for each grade and a winter-themed lesson for ECE, Kindergarten, first grade, and third grade. Students attended specials on a four-day rotation based on colors (yellow day, red day, green day, and blue day). I wouldn't be able to see the same group of students up to four school days. This meant that projects lasted 3-4 work days. Ideation was very conversation-based so that students were allowed to start working on their project sooner and so they could practice conversational English. Most of the critiques were conducted using gallery walks, group discussions, think/pair/shares, and exit tickets. Academic language and artistic vocabulary was the biggest learning priority for my mentor teacher and me when it came to ideation. If students were able to use key vocabulary words (like symmetry and asymmetry) to describe their projects, then this demonstrated a stronger ability for them to "envision and critique to reflect" and "relate and connect to transfer."
In addition to teaching art lessons for each grade, third-fifth grade students came into the art room after lunch to participate in a twenty-minute enrichment period. Small groups of 6-10 students would participate in each enrichment group for four days in the week, going to recess on Fridays. We would see another group of students the following week. There were four enrichment groups total, which meant that we would not see the same group of enrichment students until three weeks later. In order to not impact the technical and conceptual goals that my mentor teacher had with the regular curriculum, he and I agreed to teach my social justice lesson during the enrichment time for my entire eight-week placement. The topic of the lesson was anti-bullying posters, which was taught with all three grades. Ideation was a strong focus for this project because of the short work time students had.
The classroom was originally the backstage for the school's auditorium. Therefore, the art room did not have a sink or space for a kiln. However, the school will be under construction at the end of this academic year to accommodate for these resources. Clean-up procedures involved dumping dirty water into buckets and washing hands in large, separate buckets. Ironically, this made clean-up procedures operate quickly. Students were also responsible for cleaning tables and floors out of respect for custodial services. Students did not get many opportunities to work with 3-D projects this year. However, this will change next year after construction creates space for an outdoor kiln. Because of the cultural and community context (varying cultural backgrounds and unstructured home lives), classroom teachers highly encouraged that art teachers stick to a very structured reward and consequence management system. Time outs and seating charts were implemented if students were too chatty and had issues with redirection.
I taught art in grades ECE-5 with the visual arts teacher. Despite not having an endorsement in ECE, faculty at CSU and Holm agreed that it would be appropriate for me to have the experience teaching this group. In addition to assisting my mentor teacher with instruction for the multicultural night projects, I taught a Halloween themed lesson for each grade and a winter-themed lesson for ECE, Kindergarten, first grade, and third grade. Students attended specials on a four-day rotation based on colors (yellow day, red day, green day, and blue day). I wouldn't be able to see the same group of students up to four school days. This meant that projects lasted 3-4 work days. Ideation was very conversation-based so that students were allowed to start working on their project sooner and so they could practice conversational English. Most of the critiques were conducted using gallery walks, group discussions, think/pair/shares, and exit tickets. Academic language and artistic vocabulary was the biggest learning priority for my mentor teacher and me when it came to ideation. If students were able to use key vocabulary words (like symmetry and asymmetry) to describe their projects, then this demonstrated a stronger ability for them to "envision and critique to reflect" and "relate and connect to transfer."
In addition to teaching art lessons for each grade, third-fifth grade students came into the art room after lunch to participate in a twenty-minute enrichment period. Small groups of 6-10 students would participate in each enrichment group for four days in the week, going to recess on Fridays. We would see another group of students the following week. There were four enrichment groups total, which meant that we would not see the same group of enrichment students until three weeks later. In order to not impact the technical and conceptual goals that my mentor teacher had with the regular curriculum, he and I agreed to teach my social justice lesson during the enrichment time for my entire eight-week placement. The topic of the lesson was anti-bullying posters, which was taught with all three grades. Ideation was a strong focus for this project because of the short work time students had.
The classroom was originally the backstage for the school's auditorium. Therefore, the art room did not have a sink or space for a kiln. However, the school will be under construction at the end of this academic year to accommodate for these resources. Clean-up procedures involved dumping dirty water into buckets and washing hands in large, separate buckets. Ironically, this made clean-up procedures operate quickly. Students were also responsible for cleaning tables and floors out of respect for custodial services. Students did not get many opportunities to work with 3-D projects this year. However, this will change next year after construction creates space for an outdoor kiln. Because of the cultural and community context (varying cultural backgrounds and unstructured home lives), classroom teachers highly encouraged that art teachers stick to a very structured reward and consequence management system. Time outs and seating charts were implemented if students were too chatty and had issues with redirection.
LESSON PLANS
Social Justice Lesson (Grades 3-5)
Lesson: Anti-Bullying Posters
- Technical skills: basic compositional skills for poster designs, typographical designs, working collaboratively with other artists, combining text with illustrations
- Conceptual skills: students work in pairs to create an anti-bullying poster that illustrates and educates the three common types of bullying (physical, verbal, and cyber) and ways to address it. As the teacher, I wanted to determine how anti-bullying would be illustrated differently between third, fourth, and fifth grade students.
- History and culture: how bullying occurs and why it is so physically/emotionally damaging, what anti-bullying advocacy involves, types of anti-bullying posters, famous poster designers like Sheppard Fairey
- Learning benefits: in addition to learning commercial design skills, students are given the opportunity to advocate for anti-bullying in their own school. They also learn how to work with a partner to create art, which requires creative-problem solving skills and flexibility that would be useful for any team project.
social_justice_lesson_plan.doc | |
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Combined Partner Images
ECE and Kindergarten
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Lesson 1: Painted Jack-o-Lantern
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Lesson 2: Winter Blasts
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First Grade
Lesson 1: Rorschach Monsters
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Lesson 2: Mixed Media Snowmen
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Second Grade
Lesson: Cubist Jack-o-Lanterns
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Third Grade
Lesson 1: Dia De Los Muertos Masks
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Lesson 2: Notan Winter Scene
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Fourth Grade
Learning support materials, including a description on chinquapin poetry:
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Lesson: Zombie Portraits
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Fifth Grade
Lesson: Spooky Tree Silhouette
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