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- Written by: Dennis Rollins
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Lake County Chapter 35 of the California Retired Teachers Association has awarded grants to three Lake County teachers in the amount of $200 each.
Chapter 35 President Joyce Anderson stated that she had notified each school in the county of the Association’s grants and invited interested teachers to apply for specific projects that might be outside of their normal budget.
In January, the grants were awarded to Jennifer Ingram of Clear Lake High School, and Jennifer Peart and Nicki Goodwin both of Lakeport Elementary School.
Ingram, the district’s band instructor, purchased a refurbished trombone. Larger instruments are often not affordable for students and their families. This instrument will be available for students to use for many years.
Goodwin requested funding to purchase a class set of 25 copies of the book, “Fortunately the Milk.”
Peart received a grant to purchase a class set of literature books to be used during Literature Circle with her second grade class.
Anderson said that the next grant announcement will go to schools in November with the grants being awarded in January 2015. She encouraged all Lake County teachers to apply.
In addition to the grant program, Chapter 35 awards yearly scholarships to individuals seeking a career in education and organizes an annual distribution of cookies to recognize current teachers on the Day of the Teacher.
Chapter 35 of CalRTA is open to all retired teachers and their spouses whether or not they taught in Lake County as well as any individual who supports the organization’s mission.
The chapter meets quarterly. Membership information can be obtained by contacting Peggie Rombach, membership chair, at 707-275-0300.
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- Written by: Yasmin Anwar
Preschoolers can be smarter than college students at figuring out how unusual toys and gadgets work because they’re more flexible and less biased than adults in their ideas about cause and effect, according to new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Edinburgh.
The findings suggest that technology and innovation can benefit from the exploratory learning and probabilistic reasoning skills that come naturally to young children, many of whom are learning to use smartphones even before they can tie their shoelaces.
The findings also build upon the researchers’ efforts to use children’s cognitive smarts to teach machines to learn in more human ways.
“As far as we know, this is the first study examining whether children can learn abstract cause and effect relationships, abstract principles about the logical form of causal relationships, and comparing them to adults,” said UC Berkeley developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik, senior author of the paper published online in the journal, Cognition.
Using a game they call “Blickets,” the researchers looked at how more than 106 preschoolers (aged 4 and 5) and 170 college undergrads figured out a gizmo that works in an unusual way.
They did this by placing clay shapes (cubes, pyramids, cylinders, balls, etc), on a red-topped box to see which shapes – individually or in combination – could light up the box and play music. The shapes that activated the machine were called “blickets”
What separated the young players from the adult players was their response to changing evidence in the blicket demonstrations. For example, unusual combinations could make the machine go, and children caught on to that rule, while the adults tended to focus on which individual blocks activated the machine even in the face of changing evidence.
“The kids got it. They figured out that the machine might work in this unusual way and so that you should put both blocks on together. But the best and brightest students acted as if the machine would always follow the common and obvious rule, even when we showed them that it might work differently,” wrote Gopnik in her forthcoming column in The Wall Street Journal.
Overall, the youngsters were more likely to entertain unlikely possibilities to figure out “blicketness.” This confirmed the researchers’ hypothesis that preschoolers and kindergartners instinctively follow Bayesian logic, a statistical model that draws inferences by calculating the probability of possible outcomes.
"One big question, looking forward, is what makes children more flexible learners – are they just free from the preconceptions that adults have, or are they fundamentally more flexible or exploratory in how they see the world?” said Christopher Lucas, lead author of the paper and a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. “Regardless, children have a lot to teach us about learning."
Other co-authors of the study are Thomas Griffiths and Sophie Bridgers of the UC Berkeley Department of Psychology.
Yasmin Anwar writes for the UC Berkeley News Center.
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- Written by: Editor
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – The school food service directors of Lake County have been making leaps and bounds in making the meals they serve to children healthy and locally sourced.
They use the program Farm to School to connect with local farmers and get their products into your child’s meals.
The Kids Cook Off was designed in order to actively involve students in the kitchen by requiring them to develop recipes that met USDA guidelines for the National School Lunch Program.
Kelseyville Unified School District, Konocti Unified School District and Lakeport Unified School District participated in the event on Feb. 26 at Lower Lake High School.
They battled for an hour over hot stoves and cutting boards to create a healthy pasta dish. An expert panel of judges evaluated each dish and determined Kelseyville Unified School District’s team of sixth to eighth graders to be the winner with their spaghetti confetti recipe.
This recipe is currently featured at TJ’s Bar and Grill in Lakeport for the month of March as well as Aroma’s Restaurant on March 12 and 13.
The food service directors congratulate the schools of Lake County in all of their success.
The Kids Cook Off was created by Lindsey Danner and Olivia Kosten, Golden Gate Dietetic Interns, as part of a collaborative project with the Health Leadership Network to reduce chronic disease by increasing access to nutritious foods, increasing physical activity, reducing smoking and promoting emotional well-being.
It is funded by a grant by the Centers for Disease Control awarded to St. Helena Hospital Clear Lake.
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- Written by: Editor
LAKEPORT, Calif. – The Lakeport Christian Center Preschool will hold a chili cookoff fundraiser on Friday, March 28.
The cookoff will be held from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at the school, 455 S. Forbes St.
All funds go to help with preschool upgrades, including new toys and bookshelves.
Adult tickets are $8, children under 12 are $5 and a discounted rate for family of four is $20.
For more information call the preschool at 707-262-5520.