First Day of School

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This week's lesson was a lot of fun. The first days of school were always great days during my school years. I was so impressed by the rest of the #PSUAgEd20 Cohort on how good everyone's lessons were this week. I saw so many cool ideas this week on how to do this lesson and how to get to know their students.

I am actually really proud of my lesson. When I student teach, one of the very first classes that I will be teaching will be soils. So I did a soils lesson where we taught about the soil horizons and made a connection to our personal selves.


Students had to fill out each section with their own personal answers. These would then be collected at the end of the class for the teacher to learn about the students. These questions were carefully designed and picked. Here are the connections: 

O – Horizon is Organic Matter and Nutrients: Your name is who you are and the organic matter and nutrients are critical for plant growth. 
A – Horizon is Topsoil: Plants have no future without good topsoil. And your career goals can be your future that you are growing towards. 
B – Horizon is Subsoil: The subsoil is where a plant or tree gets all of its strength. Your hobbies and interests are your strengths and define who you are.
C – Horizon is Parent Material: Parent material can tell a lot of stories. Hopefully, the things you learn in this course so you can teach others. 
R – Horizon is Bedrock: Bedrock is super old and so am I! 

I had a lot of fun with this lesson because it worked really well but I have a lot to work on with my teaching style. I need to do a better job of stating the objectives at the beginning of the lesson. I just jumped into the lesson and didn't give the students an overview of the objectives. I also need to do a better job of listing out the instructions on what I want students to do during an assignment.

Lastly, I have a question about classroom management. I'll be honest, I would rather ignore a student when they make a negative comment towards the lesson rather than address it. I know I need to get better at this but don't know-how.

How do you best manage your students when they act up in class?

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