Fourth grade teachers Lisa Hoffman, Brittany Praytor, Jennifer Austin and Allison Barr were at Mills River Elementary recently, transforming their classrooms and their section of the hallway into “Camp EOG” for their students.
Elementary students throughout the county will be taking their End-of-Grade tests the last two weeks of school, which lets out June 10. Reviewing curriculum is nothing new, but “Camp EOG” is a way for students to review “in more fun ways than just sitting at their desks,” Hoffman said.
“They’re trying to earn s’mores by doing different activities,” Praytor said as she signed off on students’ activity cards that spelled out the name of the traditional camping treat.
She explained that on the last day of Camp EOG, each student had to choose and complete three reading and three mathematics activities, which took place in the four classrooms and hallway.
“We have a station for almost every (North Carolina education) standard,” Praytor said.
She and Austin started Camp EOG for their classes last year and Hoffman said, “It looked like a lot of fun, so the whole hallway did it (this year).”
In her classroom – renamed Camp Blue Ridge for the week – students created robots on graph paper using pre-assigned area and perimeter measurements and played a game based on “Dance Dance Revolution,” where they read geometry vocabulary words that popped up on a screen and created the angles and shapes with their feet.
Austin’s room (Camp DuPont), was focusing on fiction, nonfiction, vocabulary and in-sentence word context. In one corner of the room students were “Text Detectives” looking through binoculars made from toilet paper rolls at their papers, figuring out word meanings in sentences.
Posted along the hallway outside of Camp DuPont were index cards with phrases on them, which students studied before writing something down on their clipboards.
In this scavenger hunt-style game, Austin explained, “They’re looking up multiple meanings of words and looking at context clues and choosing the best meaning of the words.”
In Hoffman’s classroom (Camp Chimney Rock), students were eating their midmorning snacks in a giant camping tent Hoffman had brought from home to reinforce Camp EOG’s identity.
“They’ll do an activity in here with their clipboards,” reviewing by the light of electric camping lamps, Hoffman said.
“They challenge each other so much more when they work in groups,” said Austin.
For more photos of Camp EOG, check out the Facebook album.
(Written by Molly McGowan Gorsuch, HCPS Public Information Officer.)