This is an excerpt from a featured story available in the Winter 2024 edition of the Pioneer Pages.
Finding the “one.” The one student still searching for their reason as to why they enjoy coming to and being at school. Canaan Middle School has not only been successful in finding those students, but also giving them that reason to enjoy schooling.
According to recent One Needs Assessments for Canaan, streamlining cross curricular units across several content areas would create an overall impact on all students and could improve student performance.
With testing results in mind, over the past two years, school work based on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) has taken increased focus among Canaan administration. It started by giving fifth and sixth grade students the opportunity to travel to the high school and learn in the Amazon Web Services-funded Think Big Space. There students are able to take what they are learning in their classrooms and build off of it with hands-on experiences. The extension of the classroom gives the students a chance to work with coding, robotics, and even AI.
The student response from those experiences were positive, and their ability to “Think Big” has led to additional STEM-based learning in their own building and beyond. Canaan recently opened their own satellite version of the AWS Think Big Space, the 20th such space in Ohio and 40th globally. Alder is proud to host two AWS Think Big Spaces in the district.
The full featured story on Monroe's House System is available here.