Etch 'n Sketch Reflections

3 down, 1 to go. It's a little hard to believe that after this week it will be April and the start of the 4th quarter (I know that I make those comments of "I can't believe it's already..." but time is flying!). This has been a really good week, but not a busy one. It's Spring Break week in Sheboygan Falls, and I have taken advantage of some much-needed R&R (and more to come) along with getting a few things checked off the to-do list. On the R&R front, there have been plenty of opportunities for family time. On Tuesday night my wife and I had an overnight stay at the Osthoff Resort in Elkhart Lake. I won it in a basket raffle a few weeks earlier at a fundraising event, and Spring Break seemed like the perfect opportunity to take advantage of using it. We had never been to the Osthoff before, and it was very relaxing--fantastic food and a great suite! We have some more (extended) family time planned this weekend with a trip down to Wisconsin Dells. My ...

All in all, this has been a good week! Tomorrow marks the end of the quarter, so we are wrapping the quarter up with some projects (along with taking it a little easy on the 8th graders since they had state testing start this week). In 7th grade, the students have wrapped up learning about natural selection, and we built the connection from natural selection to evolution. We started off with a WebQuest to learn about the evolution of arthropods. I was a little surprised by how some of the students couldn't seem to handle seeing these creepy, crawly critters on the computer screen, but I guess it takes some of them longer to outgrow this. Once learning about all the unique adaptations that have helped arthropods survive, the students have been tasked with selecting a current organism and imagining what adaptations the organism will have in two million years. I have a feeling I am going to encounter some rather interesting creations! ***Side note: I need to apologize, as last week ...

This week was, for the most part, a "back to normal" week following last week (both at school and at home). I'm definitely not nearly as tired as I was this time last week! One thing I can say, though, is that the students seem to be VERY energized as a whole...I think they can smell Spring Break is approaching. But there's still so much to do! The 7th graders have been focusing on natural selection, and I had a lot of fun with this week's activities! The first (main) activity that they did was to collect and analyze data on fish populations in order to create graphs of how the populations changed from one generation to the next. I borrowed this idea from my daughter's school. She had asked me a question about some homework, and I saw that they were working on some similar topics that we were. I noticed a little bit of the activity that she had done (just the data collection) and asked her to explain it to me. That was all I needed to put the rest together! I...

Today's post is going to be a short one because, well, I'm beat, and sleep is what I need most right now! This was a very long and draining week. Not because of school, though; this week's exhaustion is home-related. Some of you may know that my wife, Erin, has MS, and she has been needing extra help at home due to her disease. Needless to say, as I'm sure you can imagine, being husband, caregiver, father, and teacher all wrapped into one can be tiring at times, especially when you throw in learning new curriculums. But here's to hoping for changes on the horizon, as this week Erin had some MS treatments that are meant to kill off and reprogram the cells that attack her body and cause her MS (the easiest way to describe it is chemotherapy for MS)--that's some pretty cool science right there! And so, I bid you a good night because my pillow is calling my name! Mindfulness thought for the week: If you wait for the ideal time for things to happen, things will nev...

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 b...

It was a mad, mad, mad, mad, mad, mad world of screencasts last night! That many mads is how many screencasts I made last night :-) If you don't know what a screencast is, it is a narrated video of what is happening on your computer screen. Why did I make six screencasts last night, you ask? Well, this morning I had a substitute teacher for my 7th-grade class while I was in a curriculum meeting, and my students were starting a new project that had many steps to it. The project packet had the directions on it, but some things may have needed extra explanation that the substitute may have been unable to supply. So, I did the next best thing and recorded myself giving the explanations on a digital copy of the document. But why six screencasts? The project was divided up into six sections, and making one long video would probably leave the students saying, "That's too long so I won't bother!" By making six videos, the students are able to just watch the ones they need...

Whew! There have been a couple late nights this week (tonight included) working on lessons, and (once again) it wasn't even a full week of school! Last night ended up being a late night because I ended up calling an audible on my 7th-grade plans for today. The 7th graders were going to have a quiz today, but following one of the review activities that we did, I felt like there were a few areas that they could use some more work with and they weren't quite ready for the quiz. So, rather than simply having the students look over their notes for another day and play another review game, I thought about how we could engage with the information in a way that we hadn't before. That's when my 3rd-grade brain kicked in a little--I'd have them do a readers theater! So, with my fingers furiously typing last night, I knocked out a short readers theater. We tried it out today; I wasn't completely sure how they would react to it (although I had a strong feeling about what so...