School Zone
Points of Pride
Ortega Elementary Students Journey to Africa with Storyteller
Author and wildlife photographer Patsy Smith Roberts recently stopped by Ortega Elementary to share her stories and photos from Africa.
Smith Roberts has visited Africa more than 20 times since 1991. She has traveled to Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Zambia and her favorite, Botswana. While in Africa, she photographs real animals that she uses as characters in her books. Her favorite animal to photograph are the lions, and she has seen more than 1,000.
During her presentation, Smith Roberts shared her stories of being chased by an elephant, finding herself inches away from three lions fighting, and taking pictures of African students who had never had the opportunity to see what they looked like until she showed them their photos.
Smith Roberts also had mementos from Africa on display, including a lion's claw and African headpiece, as well as examples of the many photographs she has taken of all different kinds of wildlife.
Students asked Smith Roberts many questions, including what it felt like to be in Africa.
"When I was your age, I never thought I would visit Africa and write stories. I grew up on a tobacco farm in south Georgia," said Smith Roberts. "I still don't understand exactly how I got off the farm and to Africa, but it shows you that anything is possible."
Smith Roberts had always wanted to be a children's book author, but it wasn't until she experienced changes in her personal life that made her dream a reality. She found herself in a position of needing a job and not knowing what to do. Her friends encouraged her to sell photographs she had taken during her trips to Africa, and she began selling them at an art festival in her hometown.
It was then that she realized how interested children were in her pictures of the animals.
"Children would come into my booth and roar like a lion before they could actually talk," she said. "I thought, wouldn’t it be great to write a little story with a moral lesson that could help children along the way?"
Since 2001, Smith Roberts has published four books: Rory, The Adventures of a Lion Cub; Kabelo, The Adventures of a Giraffe; Willis the Warthog; and Nigel. She loves visiting schools to encourage children to read and write their own stories.
"It is important for children to read because stories will take them anywhere in the world. When they read and enjoy it, they are learning and may not even realize it," she said. "I visit schools because children need the opportunity to meet real authors and know that they can write stories, too."
Patsy Smith Roberts has also turned her trips to Africa into opportunities to give back to the children in the communities she visits. She has brought them writing supplies, clothes and shoes. She has also photographed them, often being the first and only person to capture them on film.
Mayport Middle Student Wins Florida Writing Award
Nathan Wray, an eighth-grade student at Mayport Middle, was selected from more than 300 entries as a 2009 winner for the Florida Council of Teachers of English (FCTE) Writing Award. Wray was one of 15 in the state, and the only student from Northeast Florida, selected.
For the award, Wray submitted Apartheid in South Africa, a research paper on apartheid and a first-person letter in which he placed himself in 1991 South Africa and wrote a letter to President de Klerk. In the letter, Wray takes on the persona of a Jacksonville business man who owns "a small summer apartment in Johannesburg." He encourages President de Klerk to collaborate with such prominent men as Mr. Oliver Tambo and Mr. Nelson Mandela to solve the problem of apartheid.
Wray was recommended by his Language Arts teacher, Linda Bishop, who applauded Nathan's ability, at 12 years old, to imagine South Africa in 1991 and write about what the country needed at the time.
Bishop has recommended her students for the FCTE award in the past; this is the fifth time in 10 years that she has had a state winner.
Wray will be receiving a $100 check during FCTE's conference in Orlando. FCTE is a non-profit organization promoting knowledge, communication and cooperation among those responsible for teaching English and Language Arts in Florida.
Sandalwood Students Participate in Cross-Curriculum Projects
This school year, students in Sandalwood High School's Academy of Information Technology (AOIT) will participate in cross-curriculum projects that integrate their core subjects to their academy subjects.
Each grading period, freshmen in the school’s AOIT will work on a project that focuses on English, math, science or social studies. Students will connect what they learn in their core classes to create a combined project that furthers their understanding of the subject and connects to real world situations.
Projects are not only a collaboration for students, as teachers also have to work together to plan their individual curriculum around each other to ensure the success of the projects.
"The projects are exactly learning multipliers," said Tom Foppiano, Human Geography teacher. “They enable teachers to engage their students, and they also allow the students to do projects that engage their peers through visual stimuli.”
For the first of four projects this school year, students focused on science. During the first grading period, students studied severe weather, including lighting, hurricanes, tornadoes and flooding.
Students were tasked with building a mock arena on the Westside of Jacksonville that would be safe from severe weather.
To complete the task, students had to determine which severe weather conditions Jacksonville is traditionally known to have – combining both the science and geographic aspects. They then had to graph the coordinates of the location to see what size stadium would fit in the location – the math aspect of the project. The final aspect is English, which will be graded based on the spelling, grammar and composition of the final report.
Students completed the project by creating an informative, concise and entertaining PowerPoint presentation that summarizes the reasons people will be safe from severe weather in the proposed arena.
To present their project, students used interactive whiteboards that were provided to the school through a Workforce Grant. The school currently has six of the high-tech whiteboards, which allow teachers and students to annotate presentations and run any software application projected onto the whiteboard from a connected computer.
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