Down to the Wire

I never thought that the end of this experience would come it seemed like student teaching was going to gon on forever and prolong my fear of graduating and becoming an adult; and then in the blink of an eye there are only 3 weeks left of it! I cannot believe it, finishing up these last 3 weeks of student teaching will be bitter sweet. I have grown very fond of my students, each one of them having taught me something different. I am most proud of the help that I gave to our 7th grade FFA Vice President. She was nominated to attend Jr. National Young Leaders Conference this summer. I was fortunate enough to attend the life changing National Young Leaders Conference when I was a Junior in high school and got a chance to explain some of the wonderful experiences that she will have during her trip. I really felt like I had that "ah ha" moment when she asked me if she could run some fundraising ideas by me, it made me feel so good knowing that I am helping her achieve something that she really wants to do.

As I reflect back on this week, I felt as if I have hit a rut. A rut where I am lecturing more and more. It is not something that I am happy about. I am not sure how I got to this point or what happened to my engaging hands on activities but they seemed to have disappeared from my creative imagination. I do not know if it is because the end is near or if I ran out of ideas (which is not likely!) I want to get back to that point where I was about 2 weeks ago. I am focusing really hard this upcoming week on getting back to that point.

Aside from my heavy lecturing my Ag 7 students learned about habitats and insects. I had them create a project on a habitat of their choice from the ones that we talked about in class. I told my students that they could pick any medium to portray their project as long as it encompassed the elements of the rubric. I was very surprised to see how awesome their projects came out. I even had one student create a shirt! During Ag 7 this week we also explored pheromones, insects, and an introduction to IPM.

In my CASE AFNR class we are working on creating scale drawing of a birdhouse for a native bird species in New Jersey. The students conducted their research and began drawing their designs. We also learned about bill of materials and project plans! Tapping into all the things that I learned in AEE 350 (glad we had to do that $15 project!) With my CASE classes I had a few classroom management issues this week. Students talking a lot and not paying attention. Proximity control was not working. This is definitely something that I want to work on this up coming week as well.

Finally in Ag 8 we are learned about birds and reptiles. I was very proud of myself for doing a lesson on snakes. Everyone that was in my Sci Ed 455 class knows that they day we talked about snakes I was clear on the other side of the room. My students really got into the lessons about birds and their relation to dinosaurs and they also thought it was really neat how much snake venom makes your blood clot. They were making great connections to real life and asking some awesome questions as well.

With FFA this week we are practicing for our Spring CDEs which we will compete in this upcoming Thursday. We are taking a team to the Environmental and Natural Resources Competition. Check out some of our pictures from practice this week.

I fully intend to finish strong as my last few weeks come to a close. I still have a lot of things to fine tune and I want to make sure those are my areas of focus. Some exciting things coming up this week include a visit from Mrs. Rice, Spring CDEs, and making a visit to see one of my fellow student teachers, followed by a weekend in State College to attend the PA Song Birds workshop at Shaver's Creek. It is going to be a very busy week but I am really looking forward to it!

Inspirational Quote of the Week: