MACON, Ga. — It’s our favorite day of the week! Not just because it’s Friday, but because we have a new School of the Week.
This week, we’re giving a BIG shoutout to Alexander II Magnet School in Macon. They’re a STEM-certified school and are always teaching the students that science, technology, engineering, and math go a long way.
The students love it all and lucky for them, the subjects are incorporated into the lesson plan every day.
"I love to learn very much," said Michael Stephens.
"My favorite thing is that we get to do exciting things and I like my teacher, she's very nice," said Bethany Borage.
Both students say they’ve learned so much in Amanda Cooper’s second grade class, and that they absolutely love STEM. They just started working on a few projects within the classroom.
“I’m looking forward to the erosion boxes and the mushroom garden,” said Stephens.
"We put the kids in groups, and we come up with a problem that we want to solve, like our erosion project. We have some erosion issues outside of our campus, so we're kind of working on that. What erosion is, and what they can build to prevent it," said Cooper.
Cooper says students come together to work on a year-long project as well, and this year, they're growing a mushroom garden.
"We're calling it, ‘wasted space, potential place,’ so we've taken this courtyard which is a wasted space and we said, ‘Hey, let’s try to build an urban mushroom garden there,’” said Cooper.
She loves her job because she's teaching students more than just basic academics, and the students make every day worth it.
Once they're done with their mushroom garden, they hope to sell the mushrooms at the local market across the street from the school.
Alexander II has been a math/science magnet school for decades, but just achieved STEM certification in 2020.
They became virtually certified because of the pandemic, so they're really just getting to work on these hands-on projects together and they're loving every minute of it.
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