It's In My Nature

Wow! This week was extremely exhausting but also so rewarding! National FFA Week was a huge success at CASH! The amount of participation from so many different students made the week totally worth the effort. From taking pies to the face and wearing orange for #KindlerStrong or just an ordinary school day with our students being proud to wear their official dress. Words can not express how much fun and how proud I am of all of these students in this program. We started our week as Camo and Flannel Monday! So many students participated along with so many teachers in the school who really support CASH FFA. That night we tie-dyed shirts because Friday was tie-dye day! We stayed after school, played music and just had fun! Tuesday was official dress! The students wore their blue corduroy jackets to school. It was so cool seeing all of the FFA jackets throughout the school building. That night, we went to the Meadville Hoss's to have dinner with other local chapters ...

Another week in the books! I can't believe how fast this process is going. There are just so many great different things going on. Some of the coolest parts are seeing the student's passion for supporting the program. We have a former student who graduated last year and she is battling leukemia. To support her we have been selling these shirts as a fundraiser and I am still just blown away by the support! We sold over 250 of these shirts! The plan is to have everyone wear them on Wednesday during National FFA Week. I can't wait to see the sea of orange throughout the school next week. Thinking about those words, "Stronger Together" has got me thinking. This student teaching process isn't possible without leaning on those closes to you and going towards your mentors for guidance. Taking advantage of these resources makes you stronger. Not only as a teacher but just simply as a person. I have a tremendous team around me consisting of my cohort members, f...

I can't believe that we are already a third of the way through the semester of student teaching! Time is definitely flying and it's going so great. Every week is something new and different. There are so many great learning experiences that continue to come up! It can sometimes be a lot trying to capture all of these different experiences and processing them. One of the best things I have done is keep a daily brain dump reflection to remind me of all of these different things farther down the road. Yes, this was required by Penn State but there is so much value to it. This week, Dr. Foster came to visit and that was so beneficial. It might be nerve wrenching to prepare to be observed but the observation can really prove to be beneficial. I learn little things here and there that I don't realize I am doing and realize things that I don't do. One of these is my lack of doing effective bellwork/opening activity. Some of my students decided that they didn't like the w...

This week turned out to be a really good week! We had a lot of fun and exciting lessons and labs throughout the entire week! We ended the week with a cool soil test lab where students brought in their own soil samples from home and did our own soil tests! I showed them a real example of a soil test from Penn State and then they had to do their own on the same sheet. The results were turning out pretty cool until we ran out of time! We will pick the lab back up on Monday and finish the tests. I can't wait to see what the rest of the results show and what kind of discoveries the students make on their own soil samples! This week in Ag 1, I started the public speaking unit. As you can imagine, most of the students are not very fond of the unit and have voiced their displeasures. I am trying hard to make it as fun and exciting as possible, but also getting them out of their comfort zones. Each student will have to memorize the  FFA Creed  and then say it in front of the en...

This week I was able to go with Ms. Metrick and complete a few SAE Visits. We visited two entrepreneurial SAE Projects. The first student is conducting a dairy beef cattle project. She has had the calf for a month. This project is housed on the family farm where she also raises other species for fair. Everything looked great! All of the animals were healthy and the barn was super clean. The student was very knowledgable on their project and does a fantastic job of keeping accurate records. The second SAE project was very similar. The student has a Beef Cattle project and completes the project on the family farm. The student artificially inseminated their cows and then purchased the calf from his parents. This student does an excellent job of recording all of the costs that go into his project. The only thing that he could do to improve would be to do a better job of keeping up with weekly and daily journal entries. This was all really cool to see how SAE visits are done....

I can't believe how quickly this week went by. I am beginning to see this common trend of how fast student teaching really goes. This week, I attended the Crawford County 4-H & FFA Sale Committee Meeting. Even though the meeting was long and a little boring since I cannot relate to anything that was being talked about. It was still cool to see and realize just how much goes into planning the county fair and scheduling for the livestock sale. This is a process that takes all year to plan and takes a number of different people to make it all work. On Thursday, we had an FFA meeting, my first at CASH. We planned out national FFA Week! It was cool to see the role of an advisor at these meetings. Ms. Metrick does an awesome job of really letting the kids lead and run the FFA chapter. The role of an FFA advisor is not to lead the program but to provide the foundation for the students to build and maintain the program. On Monday, I helped Ms. Metrick grade a poster project...