Ms. Walker's "Wise" Tales

 My life knowledge lesson was actually a lot of fun! I was able to teach this lesson twice, once to an animal science class that was 10th-12th grade and once to an intro to ag class that was mainly freshman. It went well and gave me some confidence going into the spring that I do have the ability to do this, create connections and meaningful learning opportunities for these students. I was also able to get some encouragement and good feedback from my CT, as well.  I could definitely tell a difference from when I taught the intro class compared to the animal science class. It was a good gauge of how I will need change how I teach a little between the 2 classes. The intro class definitely needed more concise and clear instructions and needed to be prompted more to stay on task and participate. Overall, all the students had pretty good feedback and were involved in the activities in both classes.  After teaching these lessons, I am very excited and hopeful for the spring. I ...

Thinking about this week, I found this resource that I think could have been a helpful refresher and reminder before going into this week of virtual microteaching.  This resource just goes over some tips for teaching over zoom, many of them I somewhat knew about but it would have been a good reminder. For example, I am familiar with the speed up and slow down features of zoom as well as hand raising, but I did not even think about using them in my teaching. This is also could've been a way for me to gauge if my students were done taking notes or if they were ready to move on.  Another tool, I could have used more effectively is the chat and that with that students may have been more adapt to participate rather than unmuting.  One question I still am working through is how do we effectively use zoom as more of a gust speaker with some students on zoom but not the entire class like how could I have used some of these tips? Overall, I think this resource would have just bee...

 I survived my microteaching about rabbits over zoom. Let me just say, if we're being honestly teaching over zoom is gross and I do not like it. I totally understand the importance of doing this because we may have to do this in the future, but I simply do not like it.  One thing I found very challenging was that I could not read the student's at all, I could not see all of them and I still could not tell how they were felling about the content, it is extremely hard to gauge a student's attitude over zoom. When students were writing notes I could not tell if they were done or not, which thankfully the teacher was able to assist me in that, but thinking about teaching over zoom in general that would be a hurdle for me.  I also found it was harder to get students to participate over zoom, especially when they were in a big classroom setting and i was on a screen.  My microteaching was on rabbits which if you know me you know I knew very very little about rabbits prior ...

The past few weeks feel like a complete blur, but one of the really cool things that we got to do was the Penn State Inquiry Institute. Jessica Grundy, Utah ag teacher, came in and taught us all about ways to integrate inquiry style teaching into our classrooms. It was really cool to see a different spin on teaching some very basic things that I plan to take into my student teaching. While I sometimes get into to this funk and do not know how to teach things creatively and this sparked a lot of ideas to spice up my units.  One thing that I liked and appreciated was the idea and value of lab notebooks. I don't see my whole classroom being centered around lab notebooks, but I do see that playing a role in some of my units. For example, my unit assessment for small gas engines is their labs notebook and seeing this role played a different way was helpful in thinking about how I want to set my lab notebooks up.  Another section I enjoyed was the foldable and the growing cow digest...

A quick recap of National Convention: I survived my first National Convention. It was a tiring but amazing experience to get to go to national convention with my future students and watch them navigate convention for the first time as well. It gave me an insight to some my students this spring as well as gave my some inspiration for some of my lessons. It was super helpful to get to check out resources through out the career fair and meet teachers from across the nation.  Inquiry Based Learning  R elevant connections to your student teaching internships 1. Inquiry based learning has to incorporate both thoughts and feeling with along with this and students helping to take control of their learning with help with the why and having the students want to learn the content. This would also go hand in hand with the interest approach and thinking about when creating lesson will be helpful.  2. Thinking about checks for understanding and how im...