Over the last several months, we've been featuring many of our Impact Grant winners. However, we also offer rapid grants. These grants allow us to meet the more immediate classroom needs of our Cherokee County School District teachers, offering up to $500. We've recently been able to support Boston Elementary School and Free Home Elementary by providing materials needed for math improvement and to spark interest in STEM through robotics.
Math in Practice at Free Home Elementary
At Free Home Elementary, one of their current goals is to improve student understanding of math concepts by putting forth additional efforts to make these math lessons stick with students long term. Especially with math, it's easy to teach students how to reach the right answer, but not necessarily help them make actual sense of the subject. Through the rapid grant, Free Home was able to purchase Math in Practice, an instructional strategy that provides daily guided math rotations and other resources to help students better understand the subject.
Free Home hopes that through Math in Practice and teacher emphasis on the importance of truly understanding math, that they will be able to improve test scores and overall understanding.
Classroom Robotics at Boston Elementary School
STEM is an extremely important part of the educational experience, but sometimes students may need some encouragement to invest themselves in STEM activities. At Boston Elementary School, it's their goal to boost STEM education at the elementary school level to help increase long-term creativity and critical thinking. They have done so by specializing in robot projects. The rapid grant went towards completing their LEGO WeDo robotics instructional set. This set uses developmentally appropriate tools and programming languages with students so that they become more aware of the possibilities that participating in STEM education can offer.
The LEGO WeDo robotics set features an easy-to-use drag and drop, pictorial programming language. This will be available to students of all grades and will be a great way to spark interest in related subjects. Boston ES STEM lab teacher, Susan Stringfellow, stated, "The greatest sign of success for my lab is truly being able to see my children working in the lab as if I did not exist."
Our Why
It is such a joy to be able to provide for these needs within the Cherokee County School District. We encourage other teachers with immediate needs such as the ones discussed above to apply for the Cherokee County Educational Foundation Rapid Grant. This grant is open for the entirety of the school year, has a faster turnaround time, and has a $500 cap. If you would like to apply for this grant or know someone who could benefit from it, click the button below.