Ms. Walker's "Wise" Tales

I was able to visit Courtney at one of her SAE projects. She is a Sophomore this year and an FFA officer. Her career goals are currently to become a large animal vet. She is not enrolled in an ag classes this year due to her high level of science classes, but she is enrolled in an independent study for SAE.  She has multiple SAEs but the one we visited was where she works at a local vet clinic. She is a vet tech assistant essentially. The clinic was Friends for Life Vet Clinic. There they focus on mainly cats and dogs, all pets, and they have no large animals.  During the visit, Courtney showed us a tour of the clinic. She took us through the different exams room, kennels, surgical areas and discussed how things were organized and ran at the clinic. Courtney works along side the vet and vet techs to help make sure area is cleaned, tools and supplies are organized, and animals are taken care of. Unfortunately, due to insurance reasons, she can not assist with any surgeries or p...

 I was able to visit Dover Area High School and their Ag Program with Michaela.  It was a great visit  and cool to see another program that is different than Honesdale in many ways. This was a 3 teacher program and had brand new facilities since it is a new school. I think it would be nice to have the support of 3 teachers and have someone in your corner essentially, but I also think that can bring some challenges too.  The classrooms were newer which was nice that they were updated, but 2 of the 3 teachers had essentially regular classrooms. With that they were more crowded with the bigger classes they had but was still nice to have new technology and resources. While I was there, I got to visit their greenhouse where most of their plant science class takes place in and also is one student's SAE project. Another really cool aspect to their greenhouse is it is connected to the classroom through a head house. I think this can help with management and would be a nice s...

This week I was able to bring a bottle baby goat, Champ, from my house into to class for the week, which was an awesome opportunity for my animal science class to learn hands on.  I always have talked about how I want to create hands-on opportunities for my students to get real life experience and I was able to do that. We went away from my unit plan somewhat and the students just got to learn. This goat had issues with breathing and his front legs so students had to brainstorm how to fix this and take care of this. We are between animal health and physical exams units so this fit in pretty well.  The students decided to try and splint his legs and we also practiced giving shots and taking vital signs. Along with this I made students take records of everything we did to Champ which was perfect for talking about keeping records. It is a lot easier to talk about how to keep records and why that would be important while the goat is right in front of you.  I hope as I continu...

How do we best give up control for students to inquire but still manage their safety and learning?   This week we made yogurt in my intro class which went well in the fact that they enjoyed making and tasting, however, going forward I want to think about how can I better set up labs to make them more meaningful. In an ideal world, this lesson was supposed to be 3 days but due to a snowday it became 2 lessons with no day for provide context or background so the first day we had to help students moving to get the yogurt ready to set and the second day was taste test along with a few conclusion question but with having students at all different paces there was no real wrap up so how do I make that meaningful? I do plan to go back next week and review what happened, but what tips are there to have student inquire without background but still help them get the content you intend? In my animal science class we did the tracking the spread lesson which the students enjoyed and it went extr...

This week was busy as usual, here are a few highlights! We started out the week with Spirit Games, which is most definitely a must see event at Honesdale high school. Students take a pause from classes for the day compete against the other grades for a ultimate winner in a variety of games from volleyball to relays to dance battles. It was cool to sit back and watch all the students come together and get involved. I have never seen something quite like that but hope that my future school does some sort of activities to get student involved. We also had our strawberries come in this week for our fundraiser. I was able to see how Honesdale ran their fundraiser and ideas for when I am completely in charge of a fundraiser. One nice part was we were able to keep them in the head house and after school students and parents and others came to pick up their strawberries and then the students were responsible for  delivering the strawberry orders that they got. I think this fundraiser was f...

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...