Flossmoor District 161 Board of Education members caught a glimpse of why one of their teachers recently received the coveted Golden Apple Award.
Newly-selected Golden Apple fellow Andrea Beaty, a fourth grade teacher at Serena Hills School, was joined by seven of her students at the April 24 school board meeting.
fourth grade students present a unit to the District
161 Board of Education. (Photo by R.L. Anderson/
H-F Chronicle)
Flossmoor District 161 Board of Education members caught a glimpse of why one of their teachers recently received the coveted Golden Apple Award.
Newly-selected Golden Apple fellow Andrea Beaty, a fourth grade teacher at Serena Hills School, was joined by seven of her students at the April 24 school board meeting.
Beaty’s students were instructors walking board members through a unit on “Students Have Choice in How They Share Their Voice.” The fourth graders dazzled the board and audience with examples of how they’ve combined technology with various academic disciplines.
Khamari Brown demonstrated how students from different classes were able to insert scores on a single Google Sheet. All nine students who took part in his project were able to work simultaneously in the live document.
Google Slides was the medium for Mitchell Bacon as he explained how small groups collaborated to research and calculate the cost of keeping Stitch, the classroom’s pet bearded dragon.
Trinity Swanson presented Two Voices Poetry, a duet dance with words. She said students were inspired by the Musical.ly app to co-author the poem.
Based on students’ writing, Frank Kessler demonstrated how they shared feedback about their work and brought the words to life with an app that merged their voices with matching pictures.
Leigha Lickert published an ebook of her poem about Ohana, which is the name of Beaty’s classroom. Ohana means “family” in Hawaiian.
Black Out Poetry is a method of taking a page out of a novel and blacking out various words. The words that remain convey a change of tone of the page. Lailah Taylor showed how the Paper 53 app helped make this happen.
Lucas Strazek has an interest in stop motion videos and used this medium to create a sequence of narratives for the students’ passion projects. Lucas said stop motion videos have also been created by the students to break down the steps in solving math problems.
The board presentation occurred just weeks before Beaty participates in the 2017 Golden Apple Awards for Excellence ceremony at the WTTW/Channel 11 Studios in Chicago.
The celebration will honor this year’s class of 10 Golden Apple Fellows selected from an original field of 600 fourth through eighth grade instructors in the Chicago area. This marks the 32nd year that Golden Apple has recognized outstanding teachers.
According to the non-profit Golden Apple organization, the WTTW program will “highlight the incredible work of the recipients and all they do to transform teachers and teaching, enriching both students’ and teachers’ lives.”
The event on May 20 will be live streamed, and include live interviews with former students and guests of the award recipients. WTTW will broadcast the awards in a one-hour television program at a future date.
Beaty receives a $5,000 cash award and a tuition-free, spring sabbatical to study at Northwestern University. Beaty is uncertain which courses she will take when she takes her sabbatical in spring 2018.
“I wish I could take them all, I’m really looking forward to it,” Beaty added.
The Golden Apple Foundation said as a Golden Apple Academy of Educators Fellow Beaty will have “a stronger voice and a larger stage from which to make a difference in education within Illinois and nationally.”
Beaty said it’s “been a whirlwind” since getting the news of her award at a surprise presentation March 24 at Serena Hills.
“I think my students were more excited than me, at first, with camera crews and my family members involved in the presentation,” she explained.