Ms. Walker's "Wise" Tales

For my second SAE visit, I visited Drew Rutledge with this rabbit SAE at school, however, I was able to learn more about his other SAE projects, as well. Drew is a Sophomore and an active FFA member, he has attended national convention with Honesdale in the fall, as well as ACES in February. He has variety of experience, interests and projects so I was excited to see what he was doing with SAEs during this visit.  Our class was gifted a rabbit, which became his SAE here at school, due to his past experience and willingness. This rabbit stays at school, where we waters and feeds her daily. He also cleans out the cage as needed.  For animal science, we decided to breed the rabbit, so Drew helped with that as well. In regards to breeding, the rabbit was not the best mother and Drew thinks that being at school with students interrupting her did not help. So unfortunately, we lost all the baby rabbits, but Drew was active in giving advice to the class, as well as coming in before and after

I think one of the most important things in education is help make students better citizens and be ready for the real world. So helping developing those soft skills are important no matter the subject. This week and every week I try to help challenge students to improve in technical and soft skills. Another important part of the ag classroom is making it relevant to the industry, any subject you can connect to an industry is extremely value to students. In my horticulture class, we talked all about fertilizers and dig into how farmers would actually calculate use and why this is a big problem right now. While they have a lot of industry and hands on experience in the greenhouse I think it’s important for them to also hear about other parts of the industry. So I was able to give them soil sample test and say here is our field what should we apply and why? It was cool to give them real world scenarios. In animal science this week we were able to learn about vital signs and physical exams

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 procedures

 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 set up to have. 

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 continue to grow as a

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 extremel

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 fairl