Palatine teachers awarded $5,000 grant for iPad program

The National Education Association Foundation recently awarded a $5,000 Student Achievement Grant to Lake Louise School teachers Laurie Scarpelli and Marianne Rakoczy.

Scarpelli, a music teacher, and Rakoczy, a special education teacher, will use the grant money to purchase nine iPads for their cross-curricular project for fifth- and sixth-grade students titled “Music and Digital Storytelling to Support Literacy.” The duo will use this new technology to combine music and literacy instruction and expand their current use of nursery rhymes to strengthen fluency.

Students will use the new iPads to create digital stories in the form of animations or e-books. Using nursery rhymes for the text, each digital story will include pictures, written text, student-performed piano accompaniment, and sung text. The e-books will be shared with younger students, and everyone will be able to read and sing nursery rhymes on the iPads.

Scarpelli and Rakoczy applied for the grant because they often collaborated with song and rhyme ideas as they focused on teaching literacy in their respective classrooms. This award, said Scarpelli, will allow them to “put it all together in a project that would be a meaningful creative opportunity that includes technology.”

“Using the e-books as teaching tools for younger children will place our fifth- and sixth-grade students in a position of leadership, which many of them do not normally experience,” she said. “Also, 34 percent of our students at Lake Louise are learning English as their second language, and this technology will bring the power of music and the impact of words together so everyone will speak and sing the same language.”

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