Turn up the volume
Please enjoy this excerpt from the FY21 Impact Report.
“My students were engaged the whole time and later shared their experiences with peer groups. In the summer, I recruited students for three virtual classrooms — and half of those students are girls, future women in STEM.”
Juan Bazán
Math Instructional Coach
Joe May Elementary
• Among Dallas ISD’s three key priorities for College/Career/Military Readiness is subject-specific literacy, which recognizes that literacy skills are foundational to all content areas like science, math, and history.
• Experiential learning is essential for building vocabulary and background knowledge, serving to increase reading comprehension.
• With the pivot to online learning, U2L science clubs no longer had access to hands-on tools and experiential curriculum.
Subject-specific literacy is fostered by experiential, tangible, and hands-on tools that stimulate the brain and channel engagement. When the pandemic forced our youngest students to stay at home and learn remotely, they no longer had access to this important step in literacy development.
United to Learn got to work to figure out how to transition our existing Science Club partnership with the Perot Museum into an engaging virtual resource for Dallas ISD and partner school students.
The Tech Truck traded its wheels into Saturday interactive zoom sessions where students could learn from Perot professionals in accessible science, observe experiments, and get hands-on, working with sensory kits sent directly to their schools to take home.
As a result, our U2L science clubs stayed active and many students discovered new ways to engage and learn remotely. Literacy is everywhere and U2L’s Tech Truck partnership drove it home.
