Demographics
J.H. Gunn Elementary School is a suburban elementary school serving students K-5. The school is located in Charlotte, North Carolina in the urban school district of the Charlotte/Mecklenburg School System, which is the twenty-second largest school system in the nation. J. H. Gunn has a multicultural population of 761 students and is an English as a Second Language (ESL) designated site. The ESL Program serves approximately twenty-five percent of our student body. Our school also serves many students with special needs including physical, mental and behavioral challenges. Seventy-seven percent of our students receive free or reduced lunch making it a Focus and Title I school. The school has been an integral part of the J.H. Gunn community, an integrated medium-low income neighborhood (African American, Hispanic, Caucasian and others), for over 75 years.
I am the full time Science Facilitator at my school. I transformed a standard classroom into a Science Lab. The Lab has 6 tables for group experiments and cooperative working groups as well as a Media Viewing Space (rugged area where a computer connected to a LCD, overhead and TV is located). The Science Lab experience is considered a "Special" class on the same level as Art and Computer classes. Every student in the school comes to the Science Lab for a forty minute lesson one time a week during the school year.
I teach Science using the North Carolina Standard Course of Study (NCSCoS) and appropriate teaching methods, resources and strategies related to designing effective science learning experiences for my students. For most lessons I use the Five E's (Explore, Engage, Explain, Elaborate, and Evaluate) in planning interactive lessons. I have discovered many excellent interactive science web sites where students can perform virtual experiments. Viewing these web sites as a group has had a real impact on student learning. Many of the students are lacking in life experiences and the use of the technology gives them background knowledge to be able to perform their own discovery experiments.
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