Adventures in After School Learning Blog

-By Mike DeBritz on Monday, May 14, 2012

The new version of the "Cookie Jar Mystery" for classroom is ready to order!

Here's a visual tour and introduction to each Module:

Module 1: Introduction - The Crime Scenario
Read how your students are introduced to the crime here!

Module 2: Always Leave a Note - Handwriting and Ink Analysis
The story continues here!

 

Module 3: Without a Trace - Examining Hair and Fiber Evidence
Now things are getting interesting...see why here!

Module 4: First Impressions - Fingerprints and Shoeprints
Students are now deep in analysis of the crime scene, read on here!

Module 5: One of a Kind - Blood Typing and DNA
Wow, the investigation is really heating up..follow along here!

Module 6: Law and Order - Conclusion and Mock Trial
It's time to conclude this who-dunnit and move to trial, here!

-By Mike DeBritz on Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Now that all the evidence has been analyzed, your junior CSI’s will determine which suspect they believe is guilty of smashing Mrs. Johnson’s cookie jar and stealing her cookies.  In this final module, students analyze all the evidence and prepare their case for a mock trial.

            Mrs. Johnson consulted her lesson plan and counted to herself on her fingers, trying to estimate how long it would take to help her students finally bring the case of the Cookie Jar Mystery to a close. It had been a few weeks since she and her students had discovered her broken cookie jar lying on the floor of her classroom.

            She looked out across her class and smiled silently and proudly. Every student’s head was down and every pencil was moving, dutifully completing her “Quick Forensic Review Quiz.” The students had done some amazing work over the past several class periods, and the quiz was designed to help them remember how they had come to think about evidence, crime, investigations, and their classroom experiments.

            After a few moments, the students began to complete their quizzes, and quietly came up to her desk to leave their sheets to be graded. Each student then returned to his or her desk, and waited for their classmates to finish.

            After 15 minutes had passed, everyone had completed the test.

            “Very good, class,” began Mrs. Johnson. “I’ll grade your quizzes tonight.”

            Mark raised his hand and Mrs. Johnson called on him. “Mrs. J, now that we’ve identified the guilty party, how is the criminal going to be punished?”

            Mrs. Johnson knew that moving her students to the next level of understanding was not going to be easy. “Well, Mark, what do you think we should do with the perpetrator?”

            “How about bake cookies once a week for the rest of the year!” suggested Mark.

            “AND buy you a new cookie jar!” Ashley chimed in.

            “So you think we’ve proven that our suspect is guilty, is that it?” asked Mrs. Johnson.

            “Well, wasn’t that the point?” asked Marta, a thoughtful girl from the Chess Club. “We gathered the evidence that—at least from my point of view—makes it almost completely unlikely that anyone else could have committed the crime.”

            “I’m with Marta,” said George. “We found so much evidence, especially with the hair and fiber experiments.”

            “Yeah,” added Jennifer. “We even found the suspect’s blood type at the scene of the crime.”

            “You’re all correct,” continued Mrs. Johnson. “That is the evidence. But in our roles as crime scene technicians, our jobs are to collect, identify, catalog, and process evidence. That is what we have done. . .”

            Mrs. Johnson paused. “In fact, let’s imagine that that’s exactly what we have done. Imagine that we were working for a police department. After we’ve dealt with all of the evidence, we write up our results (just as we would do with any science experiment). In order to make sure that we’ve followed proper procedure, we need to test our conclusion. It sure looks like we have figured out who broke the cookie jar, but we are just technicians. What would happen in a real crime?”

            Ashley’s hand was in the air. “The police would come and arrest the suspect.”

            “Correct.”

            “And the police would put the suspect in jail!” exclaimed Jack. “For a long, long time!”

“Hold on, Jack. You’re right about the suspect going to jail. But the police cannot keep the person in jail forever.”                  

            “But we proved our suspect is guilty!”

            Mrs. Johnson chose her next words carefully. “I think it’s very tempting to think we have solved the crime and proven the suspect guilty. But to be fair, that’s not really our jobs as forensic scientists. Like I said, we had to collect and process the evidence, and we did. But now it’s up to someone else to punish the criminal. And the only people with the power to do that are a judge and jury.”

            “I know where you’re going with this, Mrs. Johnson. The suspect has rights, too,” said Marta suddenly. “The suspect can’t be sent to jail just because we say so. We’re not a judge and jury. The suspect has a right to a trial.”

            “And a lawyer,” added George.

            “But we’re not lawyers!” whined Ashley.

            “Well, a few weeks ago we weren’t forensic scientists, either,” said Jack. “But look at us now.”

            “I believe you can be anything you want to be,” said Mrs. Johnson.

            “I could be a judge!” volunteered Marta.

            “A lawyer for me!” exclaimed Mark.

            “Me, too!” said Jennifer. “Or maybe I could just be on the witness stand, you know, like an expert!”

            “What do you say, Mrs. Johnson?” asked George. “Do you think we could have a trial?”

            Mrs. Johnson turned on her heel and reached down to floor behind her desk. Suddenly she stood up with a thick pile of envelopes in her hand. She handed one to each student.

            “A trial,” she began mischievously, “...is exactly what I had in mind.”

-By Mike DeBritz on Wednesday, February 29, 2012

The investigation is really getting interesting...

            Mark Mulvaney had been late to school again. Mr. Moriarty, the Principal of Crooked Creek Middle School knew Mark as a good student, but he also knew he couldn’t tolerate Mark’s persistent tardiness. As discipline, Mr. Moriarty assigned Mark to clean the windows in Mrs. Johnson’s science lab.

            Mark squirted and wiped with the cleaning solution, and was nearly finished when the students filed in for Mrs. Johnson’s next class.

            “Late again, Mark?” teased Ashley, his lab partner.

            Mark drew his finger down a pane of glass until it squeaked. Good enough. He tossed his roll of paper towels into his bucket, and headed for his seat. He was eager for the next installment of the class’s ongoing investigation into The Cookie Jar Mystery.

            Mrs. Johnson waited patiently for her students to take their seats and open their notebooks. “Good morning, everyone,” she began. “Is everyone ready to continue their detective work?”

            Many students had already made progress understanding how their science experiments could help to identify the “criminal” who had sneaked into Mrs. Johnson’s classroom and, in the process of snatching some her delicious cookies, had knocked the jar off her desk and broken it. Mrs. Johnson had discovered the mess and immediately set her students on the task of identifying the perpetrator.

            “Mrs. Johnson!” Ashley had her hand in the air. “I have a question about evidence.”

            “Go ahead, Ashley.”

            “Well, here’s what I’ve been thinking: the last time we met in class, we tried to match a fiber found at the crime scene to some fiber that belong to our suspects. But all of our suspects have been to your cookie jar many times. We have no way of knowing when the fiber was left.”

            Mrs. Johnson nodded. “That is one of the weaknesses of ‘class’ evidence. Even though we can match a sweater fiber at the crime scene to your sweater, Ashley, for example, that’s not ‘conclusive’ evidence. Lots of young women wear that sweater. In fact, I can think of three or four other girls who have a sweater like yours.”

            Mark rolled his eyes a little. He thought for a moment about how he might leave fibers from his blue jeans on his chair. But then again, lots of boys sat in his chair throughout the course of a day. Wouldn’t they all leave fibers behind? What they really needed was some kind of evidence that was unique to each person.

            Mrs. Johnson continued. She talked about class evidence, trace evidence, and evidence collection. And she acknowledged that finding evidence that pointed to just one person was sometimes very difficult.

            Mark sighed to himself; How were he and his classmates going to solve the mystery? He turned to the sparkling windows and looked outside. They had been dirty, marked up with streaks and fingerprints. Then it suddenly occurred to him: Fingerprints! Hadn’t he read somewhere that no two people had the same fingerprints? Maybe that would be the evidence they needed.

            He raised his hand. “Mrs. Johnson? I think I might have a new direction for our investigation…”

 Continue the story in the next module, One of a Kind, here!

-By Mike DeBritz on Wednesday, January 04, 2012

This is an very interesting project that could be a huge benefit to after school coordinators offering math tutoring. 

It's free, data driven and has been very successful helping kids around the world.

Take a look at this video for a concise overview...watch till the end and see a special appearance from Bill Gates.

-By Mike DeBritz on Wednesday, December 21, 2011

We’ve been hard at work developing new versions of the “Cookie Jar Mystery” and the “Missing Money Mystery” targeted for in-school use.

With most of our customers utilizing our kits for out-of-school learning, we wanted to include classroom teachers in on the fun! 

The main difference is that both mysteries will be modular, so if class time isn’t available to complete the entire mystery, teachers can do any module as a standalone.  Each module is packed with fun, hands-on activities and delivers valuable lessons that individually reinforce science concepts taught in class. 

On the practical side, the kits will be more lightweight and easier to use.  

Another exciting feature of these version of the “Cookie Jar Mystery” and the “Missing Money Mystery” is the mock trial is built in! 

Student crime scene investigators take steps all along the way to prepare for an eventual trial.  This really drives the learning home and provides teachers with an abundance of cross-curricular learning opportunities!

Look for more details to come in February.

Enjoy your break!

-By Mike DeBritz on Wednesday, November 23, 2011

I'm certain many people have heard of Sir Ken Robinson and his famous TED talks.

I'm less certain about how many people have seen his ideas detailed on a whiteboard.  His talks are interesting and thought provoking to begin with but after watching this video a couple times I started to "see" his ideas differently and understand his thesis on an entirely different level. 

I think many after school providers know exactly what he means when he talks about where kids are today. 

Take a look and tell me what you think.

Happy Thanksgiving!

-By Mike DeBritz on Wednesday, November 09, 2011

-Guest Post by Shelly Rafferty Withers

One game that has found its way onto the early evening couch at our house is one we call simply “Screenwriter.”

After dinner, like millions of other American families, my 15-year-old and I routinely settle down to catch a couple of hours of television. Playfully, Jake and I tease each other about “who committed the crime” “who will end up with whom” or even what crazy outcome will befall the protagonists of “The Big Bang Theory,” “CSI Miami,” or “Terra Nova.”

See, we’ve come to fancy ourselves as screenwriters: We have learned to correctly predict what’s going to happen during a TV episode (and even some commercials!) before the end of a show.

And we come by this title honestly.

Over the last year, Jake acted as my right-hand man as I wrote and constructed Community Learning’s new “Screenwriting for Short Video” course. In the course, which covers everything from plotting and action development, to characters and dialogue, Jake and I have role-played all the examples, reviewed all the films together, and even drafted some short scripts.

The result, not surprisingly, is that Jake’s become a kind of screenwriting wizard. He understands story structure; he recognizes foreshadowing devices; he’s got a newfound interest in reading movie reviews (in the New York Times, no less!); and suddenly, he’s some kind of expert in his English class when it comes to the finer points of understanding narrative.

“It’s really a cool course,” I heard him tell his friends recently as he popped in the DVD (it comes in the Course Kit). He handed out copies of the Film Critic’s Scorecard to his visiting friends. “Let’s look at this zombie movie,” he encouraged them. “Then we can compare our scores!”

I passed out the popcorn as the boys took to their task. Afterwards, one of them said, “We should be doing this in school.”

I nodded, smiling. Yes, I thought, you should.

-By Mike DeBritz on Wednesday, September 21, 2011

In the never ending search for new and useful solutions for after school, we linked up with a fabulous publisher of interactive learning materials named NewPath Learning. I've known the founders both Kurt Gelke and George Nassis personally for years and have witnessed their skill and dedication in serving educators.

Their mission is to create innovative learning materials that teachers can easily customize to positively impact students' academic progress. Their very first product was a fun board game focusing on grade level vocabulary and math facts. It not only allowed kids to review standards in a fun way but also brought healthy competition and game theory into play which won them the "Teachers Tools Annual Award" in 2009. All their materials are backed by solid research and aligned to state standards.

Just a little over two years ago they rolled all their content in ELA, Math, Science and Social Studies together in an online learning system. This system is directed at putting the tools teachers need everyday directly into their hands with an easy-to-use web-based format. I've demonstrated the system to a couple of local customers, who were so impressed they'll be utilizing the software this year.

I see the online system working for after school leaders in three ways:

1. Supplemental Learning Materials: I know that teachers don't always have access to relevant materials to work with kids after school besides homework. The NewPath Online Learning System allows you to create customized assignments for students either in the form of flash cards, worksheets, tutorials or games. The tutorials can be aligned closely to the end of year standards for that student's grade and state. You can also create assignments that involve online practice, where the student can access the system from home or during the school day.

2. Lesson Plans: State Annual Performance Reviews and evaluators require programs to document academic plans which include lesson plans. This can be a tricky requirement to complete, especially with your part-time staff. The system has the capability to create customized learning plans that can be housed on the system and assigned to any student. A really nice feature of the system is how easy it is to align those lessons with both grade level standards and the new common core standards.

3. Quality Time on Task: I've seen this many times with free games, yeah they're easy but at the end of the day and year, you have little idea what kids did with their computer time. The system allows you to control what tasks kids spend their time on and the reporting system will record all progress through the quizzes assigned. This will help you determine your students overall progress and impact your program had for an entire year.

(example screen from online game)

We'll have a lot more to come on this, including webinars and descriptions on other ways to utilize the system. Another great feature of this system is the affordability--just $99 per year for a teacher license that includes 50 student passwords.

If you'd like to learn more take a quick tour or sign up for a FREE TRIAL by clicking here!

-By Mike DeBritz on Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Here's another set of our train-the-trainer presentations for both "Being a Screenwriter: Generating Ideas for a Screenplay" and "Being a Screenwriter2: Writing Your Screenplay."  This should help kick off a bunch of fine productions this year!

-By Mike DeBritz on Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Depending where your kid’s skills are and how much time you can devote, we’ve have a number of easy to use vocabulary extensions set-up for each Course Kit topic.

Any new terms introduced in a lesson are defined in the Instructor’s Guide and are also listed in the Students glossary.  But with many of our courses being used for enrichment, this may be the very first time students have heard the terms like “Chromatography” or “Genre” or “Idiophone.”

So if you’re inclined to take the learning further we have a number of vocabulary extensions created for preview and download  under “Vocabulary Extensions” on each Course Kit page.

We’ve also just incorporated a new preview feature that allows you to easily scroll through the various word searches, match games and crossword puzzles. The old way involved waiting for PDF downloads.

Take a look at the preview image above from the “Missing Money Mystery” or click on it anywhere to sample the real thing!