El-Glen District on cutting edge

Imagine a school district that can provide field trips for middle-school students to faraway places such as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. and the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News Virginia, and that can transport first-graders to the North Pole.

The Elkhart Lake-Glenbeulah School District does just that through virtual field trips. The Cooperative Education Service Agency #7 (CESA 7), headquartered in Green Bay, makes these virtual trips possible, via the El-Glen school district’s distance learning lab and through poly-coms, portable distance learning labs. “These virtual field trips can be taken worldwide,” said District Administrator Ann Buechel Haack.

The Elkhart Lake-Glenbeulah Education Foundation provides funds for these field trips, along with some funding from the school district budget.

When first-graders visited the North Pole, they had the opportunity to interact with Mrs. Claus. They were also taken to a barn where they observed reindeer eating.

Fourth-graders made a virtual journey to a lumberjack camp. When they arrived, they interacted with author Jamie Lynn Panagopoulos, who wrote “Journey Back to Lumberjack Camp.”

Annalee Bennin, seventh and eighth-grade social studies and math teacher, said her students thoroughly enjoy and look forward to the electronic field trips. Recently, they participated in a virtual trip to the Mariners’ Museum – one of the largest maritime museums in the world.

“The class took this e-trip as a culmination of a unit on the Caribbean Islands,” Bennin said. “They had studied about piracy as part of the history of the islands.

“While the students were on this virtual field trip, we were able to contact the Museum’s education specialist,” Bennin added. “She had a program on the pirates and their way of life and artifacts from the museum to tie in with that theme.

“The students were able to ask her questions, and they enjoyed talking with someone from the East coast and hearing her accent,” Bennin said. “The Museum staff also sent worksheets the students could complete before their virtual field trip, to prepare them for their questions.”

Bennin noted she and her math students are planning on doing a Major League Baseball Statistics virtual field trip late this coming spring.

“The students will learn how to compile statistics, using real data from major-league baseball,” she said.

The district is also using distance learning to expand its foreign-language opportunities for students. While all students in grades 4-K through grade 8 have Spanish as part of their curricula, for the past two years fourth and fifth-graders have the opportunity to take Introduction to French as an optional after-school enrichment class. This course is offered in the high school distance-learning lab.

“The kids love the exposure to another language and culture,” Buechel Haack said. “These experiences open the world a little bit wider for them, which is an important function of their education.”

This innovative technology program is not the only one that has administrators and staff members of the Elkhart Lake-Glenbeulah School District buzzing this year.

As of the current school year, Sue Reineking, a second grade teacher, and her students have been using inflatable ball chairs, rather than conventional chairs. These chairs have six legs on the bottom and are made available through the WittFitt Program.
These ball chairs have many benefits. They:
. Assist in improving posture.
. Enhance students’ attention and concentration.
. Improve learning through movement.
. Incorporate wellness into the school day.
. Strengthen abdominal, core (postural) and back-muscle groups.
. Promote active sitting.
. Improve blood flow to all parts of the body, especially the brain.
. Strengthen core (postural) and back-muscle groups.
. Improve balance and coordination.
. Adjust for customized fit to the individual.

In addition, studies have shown that students with attention problems can focus better in using the balls for chairs. The balls allow movement without making noise and disturbing others.

Also, through sitting in chairs for hours each day, the spine doesn’t get enough movement. This minimizes incoming nourishment. Inflatable ball chairs minimize the detriments of too much sitting.

Reineking learned about the inflatable ball chairs last spring through an article in the Tri-County News, reporting that Kiel Chiropractic had donated some ball chairs to a middle school classroom in Kiel.

She then applied for a grant through the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay to purchase inflatable ball chairs for her classroom. When the district failed to receive the grant, the Elkhart Lake-Glenbeulah Education Foundation provided the funds for purchasing 20 inflatable ball chairs.

Reineking’s son Dr. Benjamin Reineking is a chiropractor. “He treats my back,” she said. “He is highly in favor of using the ball chairs.

“I am 54,” Reineking noted. “I used to have to use my hands to get out of my chair. Now, after using a ball chair, I don’t have to.”

Prior to using the ball chairs in her classroom, Reineking completed a training program on the use of the inflatable ball chairs.

“At the beginning of the school year, we started slowly to transition from the regular chairs to the inflatable balls,” she said. “It took about two weeks for the process.”

As for her students’ reactions to using the inflatable ball chairs, “They are ecstatic,” Reineking said. “Nobody wants to sit on a regular chair now. One thing I’ve noticed is that the chairs have a calming effect.”

Reineking and Davin Hill, the district’s elementary-school physical education teacher, are working together on the ball chair project. Hill is documenting the physical-fitness levels of Reineking’s students throughout the year to determine the impact of the ball chairs upon these students’ fitness.

“We will analyze the results at the beginning of the fourth quarter, and if favorable, we will decide upon the possible expansion into other classrooms,” Buechel Haack said.

Another innovative technology device the school district is now using in 13 of its classrooms is the computerized interactive white board. The Kohl Foundation donated $25,000 to the district this year for technology additions or replacements and $10,000 for maintenance of the items.

“The white board is an interactive computer screen,” Buechel Haack explained. “Anything you can get on your computer, you can project onto the white board. We would eventually like to have one for every classroom.”

Bennin provided an example of how she used the interactive white board with her social studies class. After the class studied Canada, she projected a map of Canada from her computer onto the white board.

“You can pull apart the territories on the white board,” she said. Then, the students can put them together again, like a puzzle.”

In her second-grade classroom, Reineking projects a workbook page onto the white board. Via the use of the tool bar, she can write the answers on the blanks, then click on the “eraser” link to erase them later on.

She now also uses many more Internet resources, as they are instantaneously available.

Another plus for the Elkhart Lake-Glenbeulah School District is that three more college-level courses were added to the high-school curriculum this year. Students now have an opportunity to earn up to 30 college credits, while enrolled at Elkhart Lake-Glenbeulah High School.

The Health and Physical Education Department has added a two-credit Fitness for Life course in conjunction with the University of Wisconsin-Sheboygan.

Bart Larson is the instructor for the class. “The course is individualized,” he noted. “Students develop programs that are best for them, based on cardiovascular workouts and using whole-body weights.

Some cardiovascular activities the students selected were cross-country skiing, use of the treadmill and elliptical machines and jogging.

Students are asked to follow these workouts for one hour per day at least five times per week.

“The students really like the class, because they are empowered to design their own programs with activities they can do for a lifetime,” Larson said.

Jim Devries is the instructor for the other two new college-level courses. The first is a three-credit Introduction to Sociology course, offered through Lakeland College.

The other three-credit course is U.S. History from the Civil War to the present, through UWSheboygan.

“The students enrolled in the classes are very excited to get an opportunity to work with college credits,” De Vries said.

He pointed out that when he presented the curriculum for his sociology course to the staff at Lakeland, the staff there mentioned that his course was as rigorous as theirs and that no modifications were needed for DeVries’ course.

Buechel Haack stressed that students who enroll in the college-credit courses as high school students save both time and money in doing so.

She noted that Lexi Schoenborn, co-valedictorian of the class of 2009 at Elkhart Lake-Glenbeulah High School, earned enough college credits while in high school to enroll at the sophomore-level status at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, where she is majoring in earth and atmospheric sciences and chemistry.

“I think it’s important for our school district to offer students what they need in order to compete at the same or higher levels as our neighboring school districts,” Buechel Haack said. “It’s important for them to have these experiences to prepare them for being college students.”