Mr. John DePalma, Principal of Eisenhower Middle School has proudly announced that Mrs. Elizabeth Snyder, a teacher at EMS, has been the recipient of the Local VFW National Citizenship Education Teacher Award.
Mr. John DePalma recalls a story, which highlights why Mrs. Snyder is deserving of this award…
“A number of years ago, I watched a high school junior searching through his school materials to find an eighth grade notebook. When asked, what he was looking for he replied, he was searching for notes from his eighth grade Social Studies class. The Jr. in high school informed the questioner that he needed to study for the Advanced Placement Test in American History and no one taught it with more passion or expertise than Elizabeth Snyder. The happy results of that student participation in the AP test were that he received a 5, the highest possible score. He also received credit for on year of American History at the University of Pennsylvania.”
This success story is just one of the many that are attributed to Mrs. Elizabeth Snyder.
For the past thirty-two years, Mrs. Snyder has ensured that all of her students learn the importance of their heritage. One way that Mrs. Snyder has ensured just this is through the formulation of a three-tier Interdisciplinary Unit approach, which she utilizes with her EMS team of teachers. The first unit is entitled Christopher Columbus and United States Immigration. In this unit, students center their attention on Columbus’s discovery of America and the immigration history of the United States.
The second unit enhances the students’ appreciation and depth of understanding of the American Revolution, by writing a Revolutionary War Era Newspaper. The newspaper is based on historical events, people, and events. The third unit is to write an “Anniversary Issue” of a Civil War Magazine that will be dated April 9, 1866.
These three units allow the students to utilize creative learning activities and a variety of learning environments using teachers from different subject areas that plan and correlate the instruction for particular groups of students. The aim of these units is to promote cooperation among subject specialists qualified to help students solve real-work problems through unified problem-solving techniques.
It is for these reasons and more that the Local VFW has recognized Mrs. Elizabeth Snyder with the VFW National Citizenship Education Teacher Award.