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OUtReach

My outreach efforts focus on supporting equity and opportunity in K-12 education.  Reading, creativity and problem solving are all foundational skills that will help young people find future successes. 

K-12 Classroom teaching
K-12 STEAM Outreach

Design Thinking Workshops for Kids, Teens and Teachers

The Human Centered Design Charrette is a K-12 Outreach Program at the University of Washington designed to introduce students to human centered design practices and the power of collaborative ideation. Charrette teams deliver hands-on workshops to lead students in creating digital prototypes of their ideas for mobile applications.  

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I have planned and deliver workshops in Seattle Public School classrooms and Seattle Public Library branch locations. I have also delivered workshops to teachers at these professional development events: UW College of Engineering's CS4 Teachers , UW's Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement (MESA) and The Bush School.  

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Impact + What I Learned

When COVID-19 forced schools to quickly reimagine what remote learning might look like, The Bush School started the brainstorming process with a user-centered design activity based on the training we delivered during their winter professional development conference.  The Director of Technology shared the story in this Medium story: Remote Schooling in a Pandemic. 

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Global reading challenge kids
Global Reading Challenge (GRC)

Reading Coach

For the last three years I have volunteered in the Seattle Public Schools as a GRC coach helping 4th and 5th grade students prepare for the Seattle Public Library's Global Reading Challenge.  This amazing program has been around for 25 years and it combines careful reading of books with a friendly competition that students take very seriously. As a coach I encourage students to be critical thinkers. It’s pretty satisfying when I quiz them and their faces light up with an answer.

 

In 2019- 2020, I was at Lowell Elementary on Capitol Hill and Olympic View Elementary in Northeast Seattle.

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books
Book Drives and Trading Posts

Book Re-distributor

I really love books and I was excited to co-lead the annual spring book drive at my daughter's school.  We got tons of donations and they started piling up in my garage. I learned that parents wind up having lots of books that their kids have ‘outgrown’, as they move on from picture books, to chapter books, etc, and parents often want to pass those along to new readers. From this learning sprang the idea of the Free Book Trading Post.  It is just like a Little Library- leave a book, take a book, but it is located in the school lobby where kids and families hang out. This is now the year round book drop off location for our book drive and provides reading material for anyone hanging out before and after school.

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© 2023 Jessica Carr

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