The Pennsylvania Association of School Retirees presented its annual Practitioner Grant awards, helping four local teachers to “enhance, support, and educate students.”

Cecilia Enama from Panther Valley Intermediate plans to use her grant to purchase a robotic ball and tablet, which will help the students comprehend programming computers.“My project is actually a Sphero ball, it’s a robot and it’s controlled with a tablet,” Enama said.Enama has been showing her students a basic representation of programming codes for computers by using cups and symbols, and plans on using the robot as a real-world result of what coding can yield.“We actually use cups to do programming, as a kind of example on how to program,” Enama said. “The cups are actually a way to represent coding, if you want to move a cup up you have to draw an ‘up’ arrow to the right. Then they have to decide how many ‘ups’ they would need in order to stack a pyramid. This will actually show them the final product, to see how it goes from playing to cups, to an actual robot.”Danielle Bales, a kindergarten through third grade guidance counselor also from Panther Valley, will be applying her grant toward obtaining materials that teach students about social, emotional and career concepts.“I’m going to use the grant to purchase resources that I do not have that will benefit the students,” Bales said. “Children’s books dealing with addiction, games, other things I can use in small groups and classroom guidance. There are also some tactical things, such as stress balls, that I’ll be able to provide to the students.”Miranda Allen, an industrial arts teacher from Palmerton High School, will use her grant to purchase materials for a double bench chair that will be placed in the high school courtyard.“I was very excited to chosen. I’ve applied for grants for nine years, and this is the first one I’ve gotten,” Allen said. “We’re going to make a bench as a beautification project for the Palmerton senior high school. It’s going to go in the courtyard area. There are going to be three total benches. The students are going to be responsible for drawing out the plans, figuring out what kind of supplies they’ll need. They’ll need to operate under the budget, have everything delivered, cut all the lumber, assemble it, finish it, make sure it’s going to survive all the elements outside.”Tammy Hoffman, speech and language specialist from Towamensing Elementary, plans on applying the grant toward the purchase of a new speech therapy equipment.“I’m a speech therapist, and the thing I’m ordering is called the ‘Expanding Expression Tool,’ ” Hoffman said. “It’s a hands-on therapy tool that I can use with kids from kindergarten to 12th grade, regular ed, special ed, and it just helps them expand every area of language — oral expression, written expression, vocabulary, defining, describing, everything. This school kit is going to help them build up their skills in all areas of language.”The PASR has been granting these awards to schoolteachers and employees for a long time. However, some years have seen only a few applicants.“I know there were some years when we were rather worried that there weren’t enough applicants,” new president Molly Phillips said.“We thought it would be nice to use the money for as many people as we could. This year, we ended up with eight applicants. That was really nice. It meant to us that learning was going on in a lot of different ways. We like the idea of being able to help teachers with a pet project, when they know the school district won’t be able to afford it, and it’s something new, something different, something that will enhance education.”The $750 total grant will be divided among the four recipients.“Sometimes money can go a long way if you are creative with it, and these four women really were,” Phillips said.