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Brown Elementary Newsletter Project

Cheryl Cliett, Governor Jeb Bush's education advisor, visits Leigh Registers 3rd Grade class

Times Staff Reporter

Cheryl Cliett is currently serving as the Governor's Teacher-in-Residence, the first time in Florida history someone has served in that position.

On announcing the post last September, governor bush said, "Teachers' voices need to be heard at the highest levels of government," adding, "with the creation of the Teacher-In-Residence, for the first time ever, Florida's teachers will now have a direct link to the Governor's Office."

Before her appointment, cliett was an elementary teacher in theFlorida school system for 17 years.  She says she strongly supports the Governor's A-Plus policy and the voucher programs, and says she also strongly believes in working to improve the public school system.

Last Thursday morning Cliett came to Leigh Register's 3rd grad class at Brown Elementary School to see how the students were doing with their newsletter project called "The Tiger Tree."  The Tiger Tree is the newsletter the students have been developing and producing for past ten weeks.

Register, along with Palmer Hasty, a volunteer from the local newspaper, provided the students with an outline for the project.  Once the name and the masthead created by the students, were formatted, Register organized the students into groups, with each group being responsible each week for the different categories of material such as School News, Local News, Book Reviews, Interviews, and a Picture of the Week with caption.

The students themselves were encouraged to make all the decisions regarding what material, written by their peers, would be published each week in the newsletter.  The students also alternated as participants within the groups and wrote different items each week.

The productions time in the computer lab was arranged so that the students would be typing a book review or a news story written by one of their fellow students.  The idea was to help them learn the value of the teamwork it takes to produce something, as in this case, a publication. 

As Cliett said, "Having taught in elementary schools for almost 20 years, I understand the importance of a project like The Tiger Tree.  Projects like this give the students in a real world setting, opportunities to apply the skills taught them in the classroom."

No stranger to the class room, Cliett spent her time during production patiently helping individual students when they might be having difficulty with spelling a word, and with grammar or paragraph structure.

After printing six issues, one reward is to realize how much less time is spent on correcting misspelled words, or changing a sentence structure while transferring the stories and book reviews from the computer screens into the newsletter format for final printing.  As Cliett observed, "They're learning."