See ya, February!
February is in the books! Now, I know this sounds obvious since it is a short month, but it flew by! To be perfectly honest though, I think the reason that it went so quickly was that this week (yes, the last week of the month) was the ONLY full week of school we had. Every other week had a day off due to weather or a scheduled in-service day. Crazy, right? What's even crazier is that there are only 3 weeks until the end of the quarter, followed by a week off for spring break (which will have us back to school April 1). I swear the end of the school year is going to be here before I know it!
Now, I know I just got done talking about having the first full week of school for the month, but I am tired and ready for the weekend! There were some late nights this week with grading some projects and lesson planning for a new unit the 8th graders started. The 7th graders have been learning about genetics, and they had a project where they needed to develop a new Sesame Street character by using Punnett Squares with traits from current characters. It's a project my 7th-grade science colleague shared with me that she had done in prior years, and it was fun! When I was working at home one night, my daughter saw the project and thought that it was too childish, but I had to rub it into her that the students really liked it :-) This week I also introduced a new lab simulator to the students called Inq-ITS. It was developed to allow the students to carry out controlled experiments in situations where running a physical lab is not an option. It's quite an impressive program, and the students did a pretty nice job with it. It is designed to be self-paced for the students, and there are bits of help along the way if they seem to be struggling. One thing that I see as an issue is that some of the text is image-based, so it doesn't work well with Google Read&Write for some of my struggling readers in those situations. I'm interested to get into some of the other labs, though!
This week the 8th graders started a unit on chemistry! I'm excited about this unit because I've been spending the last couple of months collaborating with a colleague from the high school, Mark Thompson, on part of the unit. We have been working to incorporate UDL supports into the unit. We identified one of the chemistry standards to work with and worked our way through the school district's UDL planner to develop the lessons. I was really glad that we started working on it a while ago so that there would be some balance between planning those lessons and my other lessons. We set aside time to meet every week or two to touch base on progress and knock out some to-do list items. I think we've put together some great lessons, and I look forward to seeing how they turn out. I'm especially excited about the introductory lab that we have planned, compliments of one of the high school science teachers, Brad Hoffmann, who gave us the idea! I'll let you know how it goes when we get there!
Mindfulness thought for the week: What you have and can control is more important than what you don't have and can't control. --Tom J. Deters
Now, I know I just got done talking about having the first full week of school for the month, but I am tired and ready for the weekend! There were some late nights this week with grading some projects and lesson planning for a new unit the 8th graders started. The 7th graders have been learning about genetics, and they had a project where they needed to develop a new Sesame Street character by using Punnett Squares with traits from current characters. It's a project my 7th-grade science colleague shared with me that she had done in prior years, and it was fun! When I was working at home one night, my daughter saw the project and thought that it was too childish, but I had to rub it into her that the students really liked it :-) This week I also introduced a new lab simulator to the students called Inq-ITS. It was developed to allow the students to carry out controlled experiments in situations where running a physical lab is not an option. It's quite an impressive program, and the students did a pretty nice job with it. It is designed to be self-paced for the students, and there are bits of help along the way if they seem to be struggling. One thing that I see as an issue is that some of the text is image-based, so it doesn't work well with Google Read&Write for some of my struggling readers in those situations. I'm interested to get into some of the other labs, though!
This week the 8th graders started a unit on chemistry! I'm excited about this unit because I've been spending the last couple of months collaborating with a colleague from the high school, Mark Thompson, on part of the unit. We have been working to incorporate UDL supports into the unit. We identified one of the chemistry standards to work with and worked our way through the school district's UDL planner to develop the lessons. I was really glad that we started working on it a while ago so that there would be some balance between planning those lessons and my other lessons. We set aside time to meet every week or two to touch base on progress and knock out some to-do list items. I think we've put together some great lessons, and I look forward to seeing how they turn out. I'm especially excited about the introductory lab that we have planned, compliments of one of the high school science teachers, Brad Hoffmann, who gave us the idea! I'll let you know how it goes when we get there!
Mindfulness thought for the week: What you have and can control is more important than what you don't have and can't control. --Tom J. Deters
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