Community First Bank has partnered with the Kokomo Public Schools Education Foundation to offer three teacher mini-grants for the 2022-23 school year, with at least one designated to the Kokomo Area Career Center to support students throughout Howard County. Each mini-grant will provide a teacher with $500 for their classroom’s needs. The winners were presented with their awarded grants in September:
Supporting STEMKATS Robotics Team: “The Maple Crest STEMKATS is a First Technology Challenge (FTC) focused team that designs, engineers, builds, and programs robots that are designed to do a specific set of tasks in a specific amount of time. The robot is preprogrammed to run autonomously as well as be driver-controlled (teliop). The team works collaboratively as designers, engineers, prototypers, builders, programmers, and operators to complete the task. Students learn how to program controllers, motors, and servos using programming software along with learning about controlling linear and rotary motion. They are challenged with a correct material selection regarding weight, strength, and durability throughout the build. The team is a great opportunity for kids of different grade levels, genders, and races to work together on a common goal. Much of the knowledge, experiences and skills students work through are the same ones sought after by local industry because of the vast amount of problem-solving, collaboration, critical thinking, programming, and communication required in the workplace.”
Creating Enrichment in Veterinary Science: “The purpose of our project is to create an environment closely related to the animal’s comfort needs and enrichment. Our classroom goal is to rehabilitate, foster, and adopt the animals into a home by the end of the school year. In order to meet our goal, our animals will need a low-stress environment with activities to enrich their brain function, proper nutrition, and a comfortable enclosure to rehabilitate the health of each animal. Their quality of life increases astronomically with being provided with enrichment throughout the day. The students create the activities using items ordered from Amazon. My passion is differentiation amongst my students. I have found this activity to not only be hands-on but allowing students to think creatively and outside of the box. No matter the skill level, each student can create and maintain the animal’s enclosure with proper disinfection techniques, nutrition and enrichment provided. Each student evaluates the behavior of the animals to gauge the animals’ overall demeanor. Each student knows that the animals display when feeling low stress.”
Enriching the Curriculum with Novels: “The purpose of this grant is to provide my fifth-grade students with novels that will enrich the ELA and Social Studies curriculum. I am a firm believer in reading aloud with my students every day so they can learn through my love of reading and help them grow their fluency, visual imagery, phonemic awareness, and comprehension. By continuously reading a novel as a class I expect students’ reading comprehension to grow, reading fluency to grow, and their love of reading to grow. I will evaluate their growth by assessing their reading skills taught with the novel and comprehension. As we read the novels as a class throughout the year, we will complete different learning activities using the novels to support learning various ELA and Social Studies concepts.”
