Ms. Walker's "Wise" Tales

In honor of Valentine's day this week, we tried to mate our temporary class pet, Hippity Hop, the rabbit. Our first breeding was unsuccessful, however, we brought in another buck and we are pretty confident that it worked but we will see in about month. I am super excited to see what happens and so are the students. We had just finished our reproduction unit and now we are onto genetics, so this was a perfect way for the students to see the content in real time. I also had the students guess due date, litter size, and offspring colors where they used the information we had been learning in class.  Also, this week in my intro class we dove into our food science unit. We had discussion based classes all around food waste, consumer demand, and food security. It was really cool to let the students led where we were going while just facilitating and of course, adding in definitions and information here and there. The students started to think about global issues and really divided into ...

 Another busy week that ended with a Friday in State College for a cohort check in and mock interviews is complete. I think it was week 5, which means we are 1/3  of the way done student teaching and that is simply insane. This week I finished my first unit in animal science, picked up my intro to ag class, started transplanting in the greenhouse, got a temporary class pet and a whole lot of things in between. I do feel like as we are going the weeks continue to get busier and busier and I feel like they will be like that until April, but I am enjoying it.  As I said I picked up my intro to ag class this week, which is a lot of freshman. My CT and I always joke that they are the breakfast club, because they are quite the bunch, but I enjoyed taking over that class this week. In that class, I decided to try out the interactive lab notebook we learned about during the Inquiry Institute. I am a little nervous, but very excited to see how it will work. I had them create their...

Let me just say I have the best CT and students, on Wednesdays we have club period for students to go and work on club related things so we have an FFA meetings. This week, they surprised me by decorating the room and donuts with candles, which was super sweet and fun! This week was also a short week with winter weather causing school to be closed on Thursday and Friday, which is when we were supposed to be reviewing and testing on my first unit in Animal Science, so per usual we stay flexible and we will just start next week with that.  Along with flexibility, my lesson plans changed a little with what the students wanted. so this does not happen all the time, but when the students are really interested in something I think it is important to cater to that to help their learning. So on Tuesday I gave the students a choice if they wanted to wrap up breeding methods and AI with a mini debate/discussion with a partner or if they wanted to have a class debate the next day. They were a...