Student Teaching Reflection: Week 4

Even though it was a short week at school due to a snow day, this week was full of accomplishes, fun activities and a few new lessons learned by students and student teacher.  I have picked up another class this week and now teaching 5 different classes.  I now have 3 sections of Ag Foundations, my 1 section of Building Construction and 1 section of Ag Leadership.  Each of these classes this week pushed me to be creative and innovative with my lesson and I have to say, I am really impressed and happy by what the lessons I did this week.

Building Construction
We have officially started electricity and that means I had to face my biggest fear of student teaching; teaching electrical theory.  I never had any physics classes in high school or was very good at chemistry, so the idea of teaching kids about how electricity flows and where it comes from really scared me.  I knew I had to do this and I knew that once I succeed, it would feel great.  That is exactly what happened!  I did my homework, taught myself about electrical theory and then went in on Tuesday to try and deliver the information to my students.  We needed to go over the basics like what are electrons, build our way up to AC/DC current and finished the day learning about types of circuits. 

Starting to build our circuits!  

Once we knew what a circuit was and the two different types, I challenged students to use the materials supplied (aluminum foil, 9v batteries, Christmas lights, paper and scotch tape) to build their own series and parallel circuits.  This turned out AWESOME! Each student successfully build their circuits and it triggered them to think further and dive deeper.  They started to think, what happens if I add more lights or another battery?  How do you make a combination circuit?  I was so proud of them!! They were so interested and wanted to learn more! I had successfully made it through the first day of electrical theory AND they were actually learning!!!

And they work!!! 

Ag Foundations
I finally was able to get to my favorite lesson for these guys so far this week too!  We have been learning about the swine industry and this week we covered the steps of piglet processing; one of which is ear notching.  So this lead to a conversation about permanent and temporary identification and then students learned how to read ear notches.  We first did some practice with a worksheet but then I wanted to put them to the test.  Each student was assigned a litter number and pig number and was given an amazing pig hat (Thanks to the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau for these great hats btw!!).

 

They had to demonstrate how to correctly notch the ears and once everyone had their ears notched and hats on, they went around the room and read 8 of their classmates ears.  At the end of the class, they turned in pig hats and a list of who's ears they read and what their notches were.  The students loved this!! I think that it really helped them to learn how to read notches and it was super fun.  They even got to show off their skills to a few guests to the classroom when the superintendent came for a quick visit.  He seemed to think it was really cool and even posted a picture of our activity on the school website!!! (Was super excited when I saw the picture on the website)  This activity did take a good bit of time so I had to make sure we had time to complete it correctly and also had to have pretty good classroom management as the students were really excited and up moving around while doing this.

"Let me read your ears" 

Made it on the school Website!!! 

Ag Leadership
I picked up this class this week and first taught on Thursday.  We are starting off with a unit on Parli Pro and I am going to try and couch a team.   This is something that I had to pull back out of the closet from a long time ago.  With this class I learned that the more that I can connect back to a story I have or something that I have done similarly, the more interested they are.  I started the class just talking about why we need parli pro and what they believed it was.  I wanted to get into the content a good bit before they knew that I had a strong background in this area.  We then watching part of the final rounds for the national contest in October.  The students seemed stunned and shocked at what it really looked like to use parli pro like this.  "We can't do that, it's way too hard."  "No one can do that, you would need to be a genius robot to do this." 

This was when I saw the perfect opportunity to help build their confidence and to connect with them on a more personal level.  I told them of how I did all that and competed in this contest at the National level in 2010.  They wanted to know more about how far did we get, how long did we practice, and so on.  I ensured them that this is something that each of them can do and will do.  Once sharing a little about the ins and outs of the contest, we dove into the chart of motions and created a life size list of things we need to learn like motions, how to debate and duties of the chair.

Life size list of what we know and what we want to know!  

This week was a packed full, short week and a super fun week.  I did have a couple tough classes mixed in the week but I talked with Mrs. Fry and Mr. Swineford and they ensured me that I am still doing a great job, just need to keep pushing through and keep my head up.  There are going to be hard or bad days but that just made me want to make sure that the next block went off with a bang.  I can't believe I am now heading into the 5th week of this crazy, amazing ride!  Check back to see how my weekend at the ACES conference goes; happy weekend everyone!!