ABC students get their glow on
Students at the Apalachicola Bay Charter School are glowing eerily in the dark, but it’s not from the drinking water or from getting too close to radioactive plutonium.
It’s actually being infused by their teachers, as part of a schoolwide effort that stems from ideas that about two dozen members of the faculty gleaned from a summer “Get Your Teach On” conference in Orlando.
Principal Elizabeth Kirvin said that the conference imparted lessons in student engagement through “gamifying,” a way of blending classroom lessons with fun-filled games to more effectively convey them.
“Kids love competition,” she said.
Each of the classrooms originally planned to join in with a worldwide “Rock Your School” effort with a Sept. 29 “Let’s Glow” day, but bad weather forced a postponement.
So on Oct. 11, each of the classes had a day in which phosphorescence was the order of the day.
In other words, everything had to glow in the dark.
Many teachers blacked out their windows and used luminous highlighters and LED flashlights and black lights to share their lessons.
Each class at the school tried a different creative method, whether it was a glow station to decode secret messages or glowing “bottle rockets” to illustrate propulsion.
Children in some classes wore authorized spy badges that gave them authority to take part in the exercises.
In the elementary grades kids went on safari in which they explored fossils by assembling skeletons from glowing bones.
And in the younger grades, where there was a greater amount of parental involvement, the students experimented with invisible inks to illustrate stories or examined glow-in-the-dark watches to learn more about telling time.
The day opened with a giant pep rally, stressing that “as a team we’re better together.”
And the schoolkids, parading around recess with brightly colored hats on their heads, reveled in the activities.
“Best day of school I’ve had,” said one.
Meet the Editor
David Adlerstein, The Apalachicola Times’ digital editor, started with the news outlet in January 2002 as a reporter.
Prior to then, David Adlerstein began as a newspaperman with a small Boston weekly, after graduating magna cum laude from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He later edited the weekly Bellville Times, and as business reporter for the daily Marion Star, both not far from his hometown of Columbus, Ohio.
In 1995, he moved to South Florida, and worked as a business reporter and editor of Medical Business newspaper. In Jan. 2002, he began with the Apalachicola Times, first as reporter and later as editor, and in Oct. 2020, also began editing the Port St. Joe Star.