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Camp Internet Teacher Briefing
BackCountry Studies
For the Week of Nvember 8th
This week in social studies we will be learning about the Cahuilla and their three special industries that are unusual for California tribes - agriculture, pottery, and well construction. This wraps up our tribe-specific Native California units, and the next two weeks we will be looking at ceremonies, rock art, and the oral tradition in native life.
Special guests for this week are the Joshua Trees National Park rangers and their special Junior Rangers. We will be coordinating email and/or chat activities with them and will keep you posted. Please have your class prepare three good questions for the Junior Rangers and send them to jotr_jrrangers@nps.gov- plus cc it to camp@rain.org. We will help get the questions answered as soon as possible with the help of Park Ranger Lorna who has also been out visiting some of our classrooms. Questions should include topics about the early inhabitants, geology, plants, or animals that live or lived in the Joshua Trees area.
In science we continue on with basic principles of geography. Your students will need to use not only the map the camp provided that is the laminated wall map, but also a globe inorder to answer some of the upcoming questions. The inflatable globe we provided might work, but it is not a scientific instrument, so if you have a good quality globe or large world map, please make it available to the class for activities.
In-service Teacher Training
Dates we are firming up now are November 30th in San Bernardino County at Truman Middle School, and December 1st at the Desert Sands Unified School District in Riverside. Following that we will coordinate the San Luis Obispo to Ventura County training sessions in early 2000. You can attend any session in any county, just pick a date that works best for you.
If you have not selected one of these dates to attend please do so now. Sessions are scheduled as 1-4 pm for Camp Outpost Leaders, and then 4-6pm as an open house for you to share what your students are accomplishing with teachers from different schools. Topics for the in-service are GIS (this is when you will get the ESRI CD ROM), how to use the RAAP Remote Access Astronomy Project telescope over the Internet, and State standards for science, language arts, and social sciences. If you are unable to get the release time to attend 1-4pm, we still encourage you to attend the 4-6 pm session after school.
Beginning our 8th Week
It may come as a surprise that we are actually only entering our 8th week of Camp activities. So much learning is taking place it seems like months have passed, but not so. We still have lots ahead and each week keeps introducing new materials to enrich your classroom.
We still have a few classrooms whose computers are not yet online. We welcome you to keep up with general themes and then jump right in anytime the classes get wired and on the net. You do not need to have been online as a class inorder to attend the in-service sessions ... there is so much to learn as teachers that we want to invite you to the in-service in preparation for when your class does get online. And when your computers do go online - we will host a big Welcome Party online !
Fall Community Nights
Upcoming Community Nights include a session for three classes at Indio Middle School on November 16th, and a session for two classrooms at Truman Middle School on the 18th. We will be hosting a Lost Woman Search and Rescue Mission and a Paleo Dig respectively during these sessions, plus will have a Camp Counselor on site. If you would like to schedule a Fall Community Night, let us know. Next round of these nights will be in early Spring. They are a good time to get your parents focused on the program, in support of technology-facilitated learning, and ready to help out with a year-end field trip. We are busy looking for corporate sponsors for the bus transportation for the field trips, and also have near-by solutions for schools not able to send their classroom to Anacapa Island or Yosemite.