Week 8: Student Teaching

Plants, Parli Pro and Pacing; that is what surrounded this week of student teaching.  This past week flew by and I mean really flew.  Seems like just yesterday was Monday and I was introducing the freshman to plant science by going out to tap trees and now we are at the end of the week where they are able to tell me the parts of the flower and building models of them; it's crazy!

The 3 Ag foundations classes as I just say have moved on from animal science and now we are diving deep into plant science.  We are collecting sap from the sugar maples out front of the school and each day a pair of students are responsible for emptying the buckets.  Once we get around 55 gallons of sap we will be taking a day to boil our sap and turn it into syrup.  This of course leads to them asking me everyday, "Do we have enough now?"  I simply ask them "Now do you think that these two buckets are 55 gallons?"

Tap that tree!  Mrs. Fry helps to show what angle 

to drill the hole at for the tap.  

It's great to see them so excited about this project and the are so interested in plants.  They had a great Ah-ha moment the other day when we were learning about the xylem and phloem of a plant.  When the realized that the phloem carried the food of the plant which is sugar, I saw 13 faces light up and say "Oh so that's the sap we are collecting, it's coming from the phloem of the tree!"  I was so super proud that they were beginning to think deeper than Oh the phloem carries food and connecting it all together!  Next week we are going to go one step further and talk about photosynthesis and how the trees and plants get that sugar in the first place.

The freshman classes aren't the only ones who are hard at work learning about plants.  I have started teaching the horticulture class as well and we are in full greenhouse production mode this week.  We spent the week transplanting seedlings like tomatoes, impatients and  herbs into trays of 6 packs and by the end of the week we had 800 petunia plugs arrive that we needed to transplant into hanging baskets.  Each of the students were definitely getting lots of hands on learning having those hands covered in soil!

Poke hole, put in plug, fill in with soil, REPEAT!  Working hard to 

get all of the petunia plugs planted.  

From Plants to Parli Pro.  My week was also packed full of parliamentary procedure which is the rules that are set forth that should be followed during a meeting.  My Ag Leadership class is going to be wrapping up their unit on Parli Pro this upcoming week.  During class we have being learning the basics of what it is and how we use but we also get to have a lot of fun by having mock meetings which gives students the chance to show what they have learned and have some friendly debate. I also have been practicing everyday this week with our Parli Pro Team. 

This team will be competing at the area contest this week and we are trying to get in as many practices as possible!  This is a new team who are new to Parli Pro but have come a long way in the short amount of time that I have been coaching them.  Several of them have already told me that they will be happy with however they place, they are just happy that they know more about Parli Pro and how to use it.  "Now I know what I can do at a meeting and how to do it properly!" was what one of my students and team members told me on Friday. 

My new up and coming Parli Pro team just getting ready to practice. 

I am glad that this has sparked an interest for them.  Parli pro can be a very intimidating thing for many students.  There's a lot of rules to remembers and you have to know exactly how you can make a motion but once you learn the basics it is actually very fun!  While teaching them about it and helping the team to practice, I can't help but think back to my days on the Parli Pro team and how much fun it was for me.  I love being about to share stories about my days of competing at the National Convention in Parli Pro and the students really love hearing about it!  

Finally this week, I have went back to my old ways and not in a good way.  The past few weeks I finally felt like I was getting better at my pacing but this week was like I took 2 giant steps backwards.  The students still learned a lot and had a lot of fun but I just wish that I would have done a better job of my pacing this week.  Part of it was that we got into a really great discussion which is always a great reason to be off track but other times I just didn't push them enough so that we could move on. 

I have learned that, it can take them a very long time to write down just a few simple sentences and I am always waiting on them to finish writing.  I don't want to give them super simple notes where they don't have to do anything, I also don't want to move on and them not have the notes they need but I have to find a way to make this go quicker because we are spending too much times just waiting on people to finish writing.  I am open to any ideas of how to make this go smoother.

The building construction students are always

working hard to complete their projects.  

This week is going to be so exciting with having the Public speaking contest and seeing how the members do at it.  I also am eager to see how much sap we will collect on Monday after the weekend and to see our plants in the greenhouse to pop up through the soil and grow bigger.  My building construction class is getting better and better each day with their wiring projects and I can tell that we will soon be putting up the walls and moving to the more advanced wirings.