Huntington Foundation Mission Continues at Southdown School
The Huntington Foundation has been supporting innovative initiatives since the day it was founded nearly 17 years ago. The recipients of this community based generosity have been Huntington’s public school students.
Second graders at Southdown Primary School were the most recent beneficiaries of a grant awarded by the Huntington Foundation for Excellence in Education, the organization’s formal name. The funds allowed for the presentation of a Cornell Cooperative Extension outreach program, “Finding my Way.”
The workshop began with an overview of map features, including map title, compass rose, legend and scale. The word of the day for students was “cartographer” and they worked collaboratively to make a specialized map.
The goal of the group activity was to create a way to represent the snowfall of a fictional area. Would school be cancelled? Cups were spread out on a grid into which confetti - representing snow - was randomly dropped. Students counted the number of confetti pieces in each cup and then transferred their data to a map grid. They color-coded the cells, and then applied their new knowledge by adding a map key, compass rose and title.
The youngsters quickly concluded that – according to the map – the snowfall was deepest in the middle of the fictional area and less so around the edges.
“It was awesome,” student Daniel Petrylka said about the workshop. “It helped me learn a lot about maps,” second grader Julien Rentsch added. “It was interesting.”
Southdown teachers said they are already looking forward to having another in-school workshop with Cornell Cooperative Extension. “This type of real-life lesson is exactly how kids learn social studies best,” second grade teacher David Crimi said. “Perhaps we just inspired a future cartographer.”
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