Wow...

...just like that, one month down! And if there is one thing I can say, it has been a great month! My first unit of the year for both 7th and 8th, which focuses on lab procedures, will be coming to a close in the next week or so, and then we will be getting into the academic standards. I'm a mixture of excited and nervous because this means the coursework in the two grades will veer off in two different directions, and that will require quite a bit more time management when it comes to my planning. Due to this, I have been slowly finding opportunities to steer the classwork and activities the two grades are doing apart so that I can adjust for the change. This week, I had my 7th grade students completing a paper towel lab, in which they needed to study the absorbency powers of 3 brands of paper towels (Bounty, Ultra Strong, and Sparkle) and write up a lab report. In case you're interested, Bounty produced the best results in every group's testing process :-)  The 8th graders spent the week building up some data collection and procedure writing skills along with preparing for giving short speeches on Science Genius Hour plans (imagine science class Shark Tank). I'm especially excited about the Genius Hour this year! Mr. Berg, the other 8th grade science teacher, and I are having the students work on passion projects with a connection to science every Friday for the semester. At the end of the semester the students will present their work to the class. Mr. Berg and I are hoping to have the students in our classes collaborate periodically to share progress and help each other with their projects...and we are hoping the students will be open to presenting their projects to the two classrooms as a whole (they didn't seem too keen on that idea). I can't wait to see how their projects turn out! It was a bit stressful for some of the students who felt like they couldn't think of any projects, but some discussions about their interests and providing options seemed to help.
While perusing Facebook this week, I came across this image from edutopia:
I'm glad I came across it! I looked at this and knew that I fell into the "do you have any questions?" category. However, this week I started to pay more attention to this when talking to the students and switched to "what questions do you have?" It's minor, but I feel like the students are actually asking more questions...or it could be my imagination. Either way, I've made the switch, and even though it will probably feel funny to say "ask me two questions," I'm going to give that a try.
I have one other thing I wanted to share that I've been meaning to and keep forgetting. When I went down to the UDL Academy in Oconomowoc, one of the presenters shared a really cool word cloud creator that creates immediate clouds via the web. Here is the site: https://answergarden.ch/
It is really neat, and one way that I want to occasionally use it is a spin on exit tickets. I'll pose a question to the students and have them answer into the word cloud.

Mindfulness thought for the week: Time is the difference between reacting and responding.

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