2019!

I just got my first student teacher! I’m hoping I may have some time to get some much needed organization type stuff done. And maybe even get in a few posts in a row! Imagine that!

If you've been following my few and far between posts, I promised some mural pics from my Earth Science geologic timeline project so first here’s that:

   

 


     

     

 

In other news, here's some fall 2018 of interest notes from Earth Science. I did the biosphere set design project again, (see previous posts if you don't remember this)...I am thinking about revising this next year. It takes way too long for the amount of content the students get out of it. Not sure what I will do...but at the very least I will shorten it.  We are just starting the atmosphere unit and since carbon is such an important/big part of the new standards I think I might incorporate some of the carbon activities into the first unit as well.

I really enjoyed the Hydrosphere unit! As a culminating project the students painted a canvas to draw awareness to a water related issue. I will mostly keep this unit the same next year, but I would like to try to add in more water quality testing to get the students out and doing more hands on lab work/data collection.

Just thinking about some other various teaching ideas and have decided to try to get back to some of my reading and writing strategies. I think sometimes its easy to get bogged down, always trying new activities and its easy to forget the oldies but goodies!   So I might pull out some of my note taking and reading/writing strategies that I have been using less frequently lately.

In particular I plan to bring back the power write. Simple directions: Students get a topic you choose related to what you have been covering. Time them for 2 minutes with the rules: Pens/Pencils must be moving, no taking and you can't stop talking. After 2 minutes have a few students share what they wrote. You can do several rounds if you want.

Another area I'd like to explore is student self motivation and the use of service learning to increase student motivation. I've been working on creating lessons for a freshmen learning lab. I've been following an amazing teaching blog:  cultofpedagogy
If you are into getting some new teaching strategies or getting re inspired I highly recommend checking it out!

I am also looking exploring motivation from the ideas of Daniel Pink; check out his TED talk here.

This week I plan to ask some hard questions and explore with my students why they do or don't value education and what makes them engaged. I'll post with an update at the end of the week.

That's all for now. Until next time....(hopefully not as long of a wait for my next post as in the past)

-Mara