Classroom Close-up, NJ on NJN Public Television
Mondays at 6:30 pm and Saturdays at 9:00 am

Trenton, NJ – The school year is well underway and Classroom Close-up, NJ is in the thick of things, bringing interesting stories about the students, teachers, and community members who develop and participate in successful and creative school programs around the state. Some of November’s show highlights include a look inside the New Jersey State Teen Arts Festival; original comic books about the importance of community and civic responsibility designed, written, and published by high school students in Woodbridge; learning strategies for a family approach to succeeding in school for Trenton students and their fathers; and in Margate, a unique elementary school brown bag book club with a focus on character.

An original weekly program, Classroom Close-up, NJ airs on NJN Public Television Mondays at 6:30 pm and is rebroadcast Saturdays at 9:00 am. Classroom Close-up, NJ is a co-production of NJN and the New Jersey Education Association. Additional funding for the show is provided by PSE&G and BNY Mortgage, a Bank of New York Company. Classroom Close-up, NJ is web streamed on the NJN web site at www.njn.net. The program can be seen on cable stations throughout New Jersey, on NJN’s JerseyVision and on Time Warner Cable on channel 750 in New York.

Classroom Close-up, NJ, Monday, November 6 at 6:30 pm and Saturday, November 11 at 9:00 am

• Getting to Know You – Special needs and at-risk students from Pinelands Regional Junior High School in Tuckerton share an intergenerational experience with residents of Sea Crest Nursing Home in Little Egg Harbor. The students adopt a senior citizen who shares their life story. At the end of the year, each student presents a gift of an original biography highlighting the life and times of their adoptive senior. This program is funded through the NJEA Frederick L. Hipp Foundation for Excellence in Education.
• Science of Sound – Find out if students at Jose Marti Middle School in Union City can make sounds travel in outer space as they create a sonic boom in their auditorium. The Liberty Science Center, which operates an electronic field trip program at the school, presents a program on “Science of Sounds…. Shaking it.” This program helps students explore how sound is produced and transmitted.
• DYNAMIC CIRCLE – Springfield Township Elementary School in Jobstown participates in a DYNAMIC CIRCLE, which stands for Developing Youth – Nurturing Attitudes, Managing Individual Conduct – Citizens Integrating Responsibility, Cooperation, Learning, and Empowerment. The goal of this district-wide, multi-faceted character education program is to improve communications and interaction skills while advancing peace and eradicating bullying, harassment, and violence. This program is funded through the NJEA Frederick L. Hipp Foundation for Excellence in Education.
• SOS – Support on Site is a program for teachers in Gloucester Township. Teachers from James W. Lilley School in Erial and Loring Fleming School in Blackwood meet on a regular basis to talk about the joys and pitfalls of a new career in education. The goal is to retain teachers in the district and give the new teachers a good start on their careers.

Classroom Close-up, NJ, Monday, November 13 at 6:30 pm and Saturday, November 18 at 9:00 am

• Keshishian Scholarship – Scholarships help thousands of New Jersey students pay for college. Meet New Milford High School student Jamilee Morgan, recipient of the 2006 Keshishian Scholarship. This scholarship is named for Barbara Keshishian, who taught math in New Milford for 29 years before becoming the Vice President of NJEA and host of Classroom Close-up.
• Teen Arts – A dancer from Lambertville and a jazz professor from Princeton are just two of the many professionals who participate each year in the New Jersey State Teen Arts Festival. Nearly 7,000 New Jersey teens attend this two-day event, which features critiques by professional artists, exhibitions and workshops. Dancer Mark Roxey and Professor Anthony Branker return each year because they get as much as they give in the form of inspiration and encouragement.
• Comic Book – The Comic Book Project at Woodbridge Vo-Tech High School in Woodbridge helps students plan, write, design, and publish original comic books. Some of the comic book manuscripts evolve into bilingual comic books (Spanish and English) about the importance of community and civic engagement. At the end of the process, the comic books are posted on www.ComicBookProject.org, featured at a community-based exhibit, and celebrated in a nationally distributed publication.
• Barnegat Art Show – A local business in Toms River supports art students from Barnegat High School by hosting a show featuring their art work. Parents and the community visit Accents by Narcissus at the Seacourt Pavilion to view the student work.

Classroom Close-up, NJ, Monday, November 20 at 6:30 pm and Saturday, November 25 at 9:00 am

• Poetry Festival – Nearly 20,000 people attend the 11th biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival at Waterloo Village in Stanhope. Many of the attendees are New Jersey teachers and students. The festival takes place among the restored 19th-century canal-lock and riverside village.
• Floating Classroom – Students from Explore 2000 Middle School in North Bergen catch, identify, tag and release various marine species in the Hackensack and Hudson River watersheds. The fish tagging program called Hooked on Knowledge has been incorporated into the school curriculum. The information is recorded by the children then sent to the American Littoral Society in Sandy Hook, and finally, forwarded to the Woods Hole Oceanic Research Center in Mass. Explore 2000 is part of the Hudson County Schools of Technology.
• Project EGG – Everything Grows through Growing is a multi-curriculum project designed by teachers at Old Farmers Road Elementary School in Washington Township. The project expands learning beyond the classroom and into a working farm environment. Children learn how language, math, and science are used on a farm. This program is funded through the NJEA Frederick L. Hipp Foundation for Excellence in Education.
• Physics Institute – Borislaw Bilash II, a teacher from Pascack Valley Regional High School, presents at the Liberty Science Center’s Summer Physics Teachers Institute with a program consisting of Essential Demonstrations, Physics on the Cheap, and Make and Take. Participants in his program receive materials to take back into the classroom.

Classroom Close-up, NJ, Monday, November 27 at 6:30 pm and Saturday, December 2 at 9:00 am

• Poetry Festival for Educators – Hundreds of New Jersey teachers attend the 11th biennial Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival at Waterloo Village in Stanhope. Many of the teachers are poets themselves, but the value of the festival is learning to bring poetry to life for their students.
• Brown Bag Book Bunch – Students from William H. Ross Elementary in Margate City bring a brown bag lunch into the library for a unique book club. The theme is “Character for Life”, and students read about people who face and overcome obstacles. For more on this reading program, go to: http://www.margateschools.org/whr/mediacenter_ross/brownbag.html
• Integrated Learning – Mt. Arlington School students participate in “hands-on" team projects that incorporate critical, creative/open-ended thinking, decision making, problem solving, and real-world applications. The sixth grade classes design and build cars out of pasta shapes - think of the "pasta"-bilities! The fifth graders concentrate on a bridge design and construction project.
• Dad & Me – Fathers and their children from Trenton gather at Gregory Elementary on a Saturday to learn strategies for a family approach to succeeding in school. Dads learn about MegaSkills, which are strategies that build confidence, motivation, responsibility, team work and problem solving. They also learn about recognizing signs of gang activities. Together, dads and kids learn about educational play.