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Glenwood Middle School hosts first annual Family Fun Night
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Neighbors | Submitted.Glenwood Middle School teachers, from left, Laurel Sanders, Doreen Miner, Bill Coler, Kim Davis and Jeneane Hugus posed with the Chick-fil-A cow during the Family Fun Night event.
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Neighbors | Submitted.Glenwood Middle School student Vinchenzo Ginuto blew up a balloon with a chemical reaction during the Family Fun Night event.
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Neighbors | Submitted.The Chick-fil-A cow (back row, middle) made an appearance at Glenwood Middle School's Family Fun Night event. Several students posed with the mascot.
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Neighbors | Submitted.Glenwood Middle School student Sam Holter (left) and his mother Liz Holter made ratio tables during the Family Fun Night event.
By TIM CLEVELAND
Glenwood Middle School hosted its first of what is hoped to be an annual Family Fun Night on Nov. 12. More than 50 families, consisting of more than 200 people, attended the event.
“Family night was created to bring the Maroon 6 families and teachers together for a night of fun, educational experiences,” Glenwood Middle sixth-grade teacher Jeneane Hugus said. “We strive as teachers to get our students and families to engage in dialogue at home about what they are learning in school.
“We, as teachers, believe that working with families in their child’s education is extremely beneficial. We wanted to create a positive and fun atmosphere for parents to come to school and get to know us, and an opportunity for students to have fun and spend time with their families and teachers at the same time.”
The event was put on by the school’s Maroon 6 team, which is one of two teams at the school and consists of six teachers who teach the core subjects of math, English/language arts, science and social studies. The other team is the Gray Team. The teams exist to meet the students’ developmental needs.
“Each team relays a coherent, shared vision to students and engage in similar practices in their classrooms,” Hugus said. “Students have a sense of belonging, and teachers are able to identify problems students may be having problems more quickly than in traditional scheduling. Strong interpersonal relationships are built with teaming between all involved including students, teachers and parents.”
The Maroon 6 team consists of teachers Bill Coler (social studies), Hugus (math), Doreen Miner (English/language arts), Gina Ries (science), Laurel Sanders (math and English/language arts), Kim Davis (resource room) and Glenwood Middle’s 96 sixth-grade students.
The Family Fun Night consisted of 12 different stations – plus a homemade photo booth – based on what the students have been studying in class. The stations were an acrostic poem station, in which students wrote acrostic poems about their parents and their parents did likewise about them; a “so much depends on” station, at which students and parents wrote so much depends on poems together; a parts of speech game station, where the students raced their parents in highlighting different parts of speeches; a bouncy ball station, where students created a bouncy ball; a physical versus chemical changes station, where students performed seven different tasks and determined whether each task was a physical or chemical change; a reaction time station, to see which family member had the fastest reaction time of catching a falling meter stick; a latitude and longitude station, where students and their parents found locations together when given the locations’ coordinates; an “are you smarter than a sixth grader” station, where students and parents challenged each other to see who could name more presidents based on their chronological pictures and who could name the most states on a map; a paper airplane speed station, where parents and students built paper airplanes, flew them and measured how far they flew and divided that by how long the paper plane flew to see whose plane flew the fastest; a painting with ratios station, where parents and students mixed different ratios of blue and yellow paint and compared the shades of green that they painted dinosaurs with; a cup stacking station; where families had to stack a set of cups from one pyramid to another using only a rubber band with four pieces of yarn tied to it; and a Chick-fil-A station; which had an appearance by the Chick-fil-A cow and prized provided by the Chick-fil-A restaurant in the Southern Park Mall for solving math problems.
The Family Fun Night consisted of 12 different stations – plus a homemade photo booth – based on what the students have been studying in class. The stations were an acrostic poem station, in which students wrote acrostic poems about their parents and their parents did likewise about them; a “so much depends on” station, at which students and parents wrote so much depends on poems together; a parts of speech game station, where the students raced their parents in highlighting different parts of speeches; a bouncy ball station, where students created a bouncy ball; a physical versus chemical changes station, where students performed seven different tasks and determined whether each task was a physical or chemical change; a reaction time station, to see which family member had the fastest reaction time of catching a falling meter stick; a latitude and longitude station, where students and their parents found locations together when given the locations’ coordinates; an “are you smarter than a sixth grader” station, where students and parents challenged each other to see who could name more presidents based on their chronological pictures and who could name the most states on a map; a paper airplane speed station, where parents and students built paper airplanes, flew them and measured how far they flew and divided that by how long the paper plane flew to see whose plane flew the fastest; a painting with ratios station, where parents and students mixed different ratios of blue and yellow paint and compared the shades of green that they painted dinosaurs with; a cup stacking station; where families had to stack a set of cups from one pyramid to another using only a rubber band with four pieces of yarn tied to it; and a Chick-fil-A station; which had an appearance by the Chick-fil-A cow and prized provided by the Chick-fil-A restaurant in the Southern Park Mall for solving math problems.
“We feel that it turned out awesome!” Hugus said. “Students couldn’t stop talking about how much fun they had for the rest of the week.”
At the end of the event was an open dialogue, during which many different educational topics were discussed.