Wild Week!
What a week! It was a week full of a variety of different activities, with some extra excitement today!
Our main task for science was the presentations about pollution that the students were working on last week. My initial plan was for the students to begin presenting on Monday. I had left instructions for the students to share any digital parts of the presentations with me when they were finished (this would allow me to see how their progress was coming along even though I wasn't there last Friday). There were around 25 groups between the 3 classes, but I had only received work from about one-third of the groups--this told me right away that I would need to plan a little more work time into the schedule for Monday. However, that allowed me to tighten up the expectations for worktime on Monday for those groups that hadn't finished. About 90% of the groups were done and ready to present on Tuesday.
We had some very nice presentations. Most of the groups chose the typical Google Slides presentation, which is perfectly fine, but there were a few groups who went against the grain. One group did a rather well-put-together rap in conjunction with Slides (so that the class could see the lyrics to their rap--very UDL of them!). There were 3 groups who put on skits for the class, and they were rather impressive! We did have a couple of groups who had some pretty severe cases of nervousness, so I made some accommodations and had them present just with me. This allowed me to give them some direct one-on-one feedback, and we also discussed some strategies for feeling more comfortable with speaking in front of a group. Additionally, we agreed that when the next time presentations come around the students will choose a small group of classmates to present to. Baby steps, baby steps. Once the presentations wrapped up, we ran a simulation to go along with the pollution presentations. Using some grass that I grew in the lab (literally grew, no mad scientist stuff happening), we simulated acid rain by spraying the grass with vinegar--it has about the same pH level as acid rain. We are going to let the grass sit over the weekend and observe what sort of changes happen next week.
Tuesday ended up being a pretty long day due to parent-teacher conferences. I had about half of my homeroom class scheduled for conferences, with the other half this coming Tuesday. I felt that the conferences were very productive! The conferences are scheduled in 10-minute blocks, and that requires them to move along rather quickly. I can't say that there were really many surprises--many of the questions that were asked pertained to the shift in routines and expectations from the elementary school to middle school, a big one being the use of online grade books that parents and students are able to access. It is nice to allow the students to have the responsibility of checking their own grades and making plans for how they will fix those grades that may need some work.
The excitement for the week was capped off with a student-staff volleyball game. It was a ton of fun (I played in the game!) and a great way to get all of the students in the school for community activity. The staff proved to be victorious over the students, so that was a pretty good way to finish the school week. The students have off tomorrow while the staff has inservice to dig into social-emotional learning and data analysis. It looks to be a good day of learning!
Mindfulness thought for the week: It's easy to spot a yellow car when you are thinking of a yellow car. It's easy to spot an opportunity when you are thinking of opportunity. It's easy to spot things to get mad about when you are thinking about being mad. --Shared by Tom J Deters on the ProYou Podcast.
Our main task for science was the presentations about pollution that the students were working on last week. My initial plan was for the students to begin presenting on Monday. I had left instructions for the students to share any digital parts of the presentations with me when they were finished (this would allow me to see how their progress was coming along even though I wasn't there last Friday). There were around 25 groups between the 3 classes, but I had only received work from about one-third of the groups--this told me right away that I would need to plan a little more work time into the schedule for Monday. However, that allowed me to tighten up the expectations for worktime on Monday for those groups that hadn't finished. About 90% of the groups were done and ready to present on Tuesday.
We had some very nice presentations. Most of the groups chose the typical Google Slides presentation, which is perfectly fine, but there were a few groups who went against the grain. One group did a rather well-put-together rap in conjunction with Slides (so that the class could see the lyrics to their rap--very UDL of them!). There were 3 groups who put on skits for the class, and they were rather impressive! We did have a couple of groups who had some pretty severe cases of nervousness, so I made some accommodations and had them present just with me. This allowed me to give them some direct one-on-one feedback, and we also discussed some strategies for feeling more comfortable with speaking in front of a group. Additionally, we agreed that when the next time presentations come around the students will choose a small group of classmates to present to. Baby steps, baby steps. Once the presentations wrapped up, we ran a simulation to go along with the pollution presentations. Using some grass that I grew in the lab (literally grew, no mad scientist stuff happening), we simulated acid rain by spraying the grass with vinegar--it has about the same pH level as acid rain. We are going to let the grass sit over the weekend and observe what sort of changes happen next week.
Tuesday ended up being a pretty long day due to parent-teacher conferences. I had about half of my homeroom class scheduled for conferences, with the other half this coming Tuesday. I felt that the conferences were very productive! The conferences are scheduled in 10-minute blocks, and that requires them to move along rather quickly. I can't say that there were really many surprises--many of the questions that were asked pertained to the shift in routines and expectations from the elementary school to middle school, a big one being the use of online grade books that parents and students are able to access. It is nice to allow the students to have the responsibility of checking their own grades and making plans for how they will fix those grades that may need some work.
The excitement for the week was capped off with a student-staff volleyball game. It was a ton of fun (I played in the game!) and a great way to get all of the students in the school for community activity. The staff proved to be victorious over the students, so that was a pretty good way to finish the school week. The students have off tomorrow while the staff has inservice to dig into social-emotional learning and data analysis. It looks to be a good day of learning!
Mindfulness thought for the week: It's easy to spot a yellow car when you are thinking of a yellow car. It's easy to spot an opportunity when you are thinking of opportunity. It's easy to spot things to get mad about when you are thinking about being mad. --Shared by Tom J Deters on the ProYou Podcast.
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