Summer!

I was doing so well! And then I went from February until now without a post! Everything always goes so fast the last few months of school! I've had a week off   and will start summer school on Monday. 

I wish I had some sort of inspiration or really cool project to talk about...but at the end of the year I'm always just so ready to be done. Usually during the summer I have time to unwind and get excited/motivated again! 

I have two ideas I plan on thinking about over the summer. First as an intro earth science project I want to have the students build their own jar terrariums. Might be a neat way to talk about systems and get them interested. So that's just a project to keep in the back of my mind.

I also really want to focus on teaching strategies, like cooperative learning for physics 1st. Now that I know the content a little better and what to expect, I think I can make the class flow better. I'll have good practice starting next week. I'm going to need a lot of strategies to keep the summer school kids motivated all day. I'm hoping that using lots of strategies will naturally lead to more efficient classroom management. 

So that's what I'll try to think about over the summer...happy end of the school year. I'll be back in the fall.

DNA Projects

Just had two snow days! Came back thinking things might be chaos, but surprisingly the students were able to finish up the DNA project and present. For the project the students had to either make a model of DNA, draw a blue print, or come up with a museum tour presentation about DNA. Overall it was successful! The tour was the hardest and mostly the students did PowerPoint type presentations and the idea of a tour got lost. But for the model "dream house" and blueprint of a "building" I had some great results. Below are some pictures of the student projects.The pictures show the finished products, however the students also had a written description component and they verbally presented. I liked that this project gave the students the opportunity to really visually see what DNA looks like and what the parts are. I also think that this will help them understand how DNA splits when we get to DNA replication. I was pleased with how this project turned out and with a few revisions, I will definitely do it again next year.

Model 1

Model 1

Blueprint 1

Model 2

 

Blueprint 2

Model 3

Model 4  

January!

I missed December, but I'm back! The end of the semester and then the holidays always are a crazy time of year. 

So far the new semester is off to a good start. I've been really surprised with the physics 1st class. I was nervous to teach it, since physics is not my background. It's been okay! I'm excited to teach it again next year, now that I know a little more of what I'm doing! I think the way the course is set up, will lend well to add in a lot of lit strategies, writing, and cooperative learning. 

In other news, I did my comic lesson back in December. It wasn't awesome...but it also wasn't a failure. The best part was a new technique I tried which I'll count for my January strategy. 

Instead of just explaining the comic, I modeled my thought process on the board. I put up the outline and created a storyline off the top of my head with some input from students. 

This would be a good strategy for any type of writing. When the students see the teacher making mistakes, they might be more willing to make mistakes and they see the importance of making corrections before a final draft. So the strategy to try is modeling writing from your head,  on the board for students to see/hear your thought process.

For the comic lesson, I think next time, I would go ahead and do the whole comic on the board. I found some students took what I did and were able to create a good outline. And then they weren't as successful at taking the outline and turning it into a comic. 

The other part of the comic that I liked was that I did not get any comics that were just boxes with the steps of mitosis. Every comic had at least some creativity.

My next big lesson is a DI lesson. I'm doing a project on DNA where the students have several choices for how they model and explain DNA. I'll let you know next month how it goes!