St. Albans City School Daily Announcements: Darcie Rankin

Highlighting Unified Arts at SACs!

St Albans City School has an amazing Unified Arts team filled with opportunities for students in all grades to learn and experience physical education, art, music, STEAM, and Health.

We are excited to use the Daily Announcements to highlight Unified Arts activities at our school. These highlights will help you to get to know your Unified Arts teachers in a little more depth, see some of the great activities that are happening daily at our school and hear a little bit about why we feel these activities are such an important and integral component of learning.

So without further ado, let us introduce our first Unified Arts teacher:

UNIFIED ARTS STEAM TEACHER

DARCIE RANKIN (and daughter)

Hi! My name is Darcie Rankin and I am a STEAM (Science, Technology, Education, Art and Math) educator at SACs. I am currently in my third year of teaching here! Due to the pandemic, each of my three years has been very different, but I have been lucky each year to work with amazing students and staff. This year I currently visit classrooms in preschool through second grade on a weekly basis. I have many goals during my visits which include: introducing students to important STEAM concepts and cool materials, hands-on learning driven by critical thinking, collaborative experiences that allow us to try new things as well as highlight our strengths and FUN. Even though this is only my third year at this school I have been a teacher for fourteen years. I went back to school to get my teaching license and Master's degree in Education after working as an electrical engineer at IBM. My favorite part about teaching STEAM is that it is different every day and that I get to learn alongside brilliant, caring, and funny students (I also enjoy dressing up as various characters). I was happy to be part of this article because I think it is very important to connect with our community. If you have any questions or would like to chat about STEAM in more detail–I can be reached at drankin@maplerun.org.

Things you might not know about me:

My favorite color is purple.
My favorite food is cheese noodles with barbecue sauce on them (I don’t call them mac-n-cheese because in my family they were always called cheese noodles)
I have three awesome kids who are 11,14, and 16.
I love to travel and learn about different cultures and places.
I love to read and my current favorite picture book is Not a Box by Portis, and my favorite current YA novel is Firekeeper’s Daughter by Boulley and my current favorite adult novel is Cloud Cuckoo Land by Doerr.

I typically do different activities with each of the grade levels I work with, although sometimes the themes and topics overlap. Currently, in second grade, we are working on our end-of-unit project after studying coding and robotics. We are making our own robots! These robots require a fundamental understanding of circuits which we developed by creating our own battery-driven motor circuits. Next, we attached these circuits to a cup and began to engineer and design the robot's movement through the attachment of propellers and legs. In these images, you can see students engineering their ‘jitterbots’ through an iterative design process.

17 Images of Grade 2 Imagination Creating Jitterbots: Link to Pictures