Teacher Thanks!

Happy Thanksgiving! I'm very thankful for a three day vacation! It is the perfect break to help me make it to the end of the semester! As a teacher I am grateful for the excellent vacation time! It is necessary to recharge every so often so that we're not grouchy or frustrated!

On Monday it's 3 more weeks. Reviewing for the End of course exam in Biology and a final project in Earth Science.

Excited about the final project on climate change. A subject I'm passionate about and hopefully will create engagement. Planning to make it cross-curricular. More on the project later! For now lets enjoy some relaxing time!

The Secret Pocket Foldable!

When I started teaching I had a mentor who taught me a foldable that is AWESOME! I have used this foldable twice this year. Once in biology and once in Earth Science. It has been really fun and the students seem to really enjoy it, get a lot out of it, and their understanding of the content seems to increase. This is a booklet foldable. But the cool part is that there is a secret pocket. The way I have used this is to give the students an assignment for each section of the booklet. The way I have had sucess is that I start off with the cover being very simple and mostly about them decorating and personalizing their foldable. I think this is how you get their interest. Then you increase the rigor of the assignments. You can even do book work for some of the sections and its almost as if the students don't realize they are doing bookwork. I give an assignment and then the next day do an activity to review what was covered. Or you can do the opposite and cover a topic and then for review have them do something in the foldable. In Earth Science the topic was Energy and Resources. The Biology topic I used was Genetics and DNA. For the Earth Science topic in the secret pocket I had the students pick what they think is the best energy source. They had to come up with ten statements from least obvious to most obvious about their source of energy. Then in invisiable ink they wrote their choosen energy source. They were very engaged. The following are some pics of a foldable that had a lot of time and effort put into it.

I act very excited and enthusastic when I introduce the project. It's amazing to me how just letting the student be creative, print in color, and put a personal touch on something, can create engagment and excitment for the students.

Managing Projects

I like creative, messy projects. But the problem is how to manage them for content. The easiest thing to do would be to assign the project for students to do on their own time...but this doesn't work. A few do it but many of them don't. I know the project should be a culmination of what the students have learned, so when I do projects I want lots of content. Some teachers might say that projects take too much time. But I think students can really learn by getting into something on their own. My first year teaching I would get so frustrated with projects. What I've discovered is the key is structure and chunking. Each year I get better at this but it is still a challenge. Every year I find myself changing, revising and trying to make projects more engaging and manageable on my end!