It's In My Nature

As I have been reading different articles from all over, a lot of schools are doing enrichment activities. But these activities seem like they can be and sometimes are busywork. We can't teach new content, lessons can only be 20 minutes long, assignments can't be graded, and they have to be relatable to what the students have already learned. This can be hard to still make learning fun under those guidelines. I created some really cool lessons for the first week of Conneaut Area's enrichment lessons. The only thing is, I hope the students actually participate since they are not graded.  Ag 1: We are in the middle of our wildlife unit and the students just learned about ecological principles in ecosystems. To show some of the different ecosystems and environments that the students have never seen before, we are going to explore Googles, The Hidden Worlds of the National Parks . These are virtual interactive tours of 5 different National Parks with all kinds of cool thing...

There has never been an event similar to this in our lives. Never would I have thought that a virus could really shut down the nation and almost the entire world. As all Americans are stuck at home, self-distancing themselves, I want everyone to know something. Just because we are in quarantine, doesn't mean learning stops! Students and families can set goals each and every single day to learn something new! Be sure to share it with not only your loved ones but share it with your social media. If you're an indoor person, then, stay inside and just google something you're interested in. We have the power of knowledge, history, content, and the world at the touch of our fingertips. So use it! If you are an outdoors person, go outside and explore everything nature has to offer. Spring is quickly approaching and the woods are alive. The PA Department of Health posted this picture on their Facebook this week. It's okay to go outside and explore! I have been going out...

Wow! This is definitely a unique situation and was not at all planned. If you would have told me in January that all schools in the state would close for a 2-week period, I would have laughed at you. I still can't believe what is happening and to quickly reflect on this, I am kind of frustrated. If you ask me, it would have made a lot more sense for the schools to have stayed open until Monday for kids to grab any materials from school and for the teachers to give out work to do. But unfortunately, that did not happen. I could have come up with projects for every class to do while they are on this break but that did not happen. Now, my students are not responsible for anything over the next two weeks. This is definitely frustrating looking at the long term plan and goal of student teaching and lesson planning. Trying to look ahead and start planning is so hard because we don't know when we will be allowed back. The goal is March 30th and I sure hope that can happen. With stud...

Another great week in the books! We accomplished a lot of cool things this week! Now that I have a full load of courses, I am starting to see how many moving parts there really are. It can quickly be overwhelming. I feel like all that I am ever doing is planning. Planning for tomorrow, the rest of the week and even next week. It adds up quick and can prove to be challenging trying to stay ahead of it. In Ag Science, we learned about the United Nations Sustainable Develepolement Goals and how they relate to us. Then we created word clouds that showcased which goals were most important to us as a class. Then, we went through each goal, looked at them from a local scale to a national scale to a global scale. This was really cool to see the students have the same beliefs and interests. Really being able to see that common interest of food security and being able to connect that back to the unit. Ag 2, we were talking about pesticide residues and looked at how they can quickl...