Week 2

 

This week brought with it a crazy wintery mix, I lost the first two days to cancellations.  We finally had school on Wednesday even though we had a delay.  Thanks to the delay, I only had thirty minute periods.  My plan for the day was therefore changed to accommodate it.  I ended up doing a super cool activity that the students really enjoyed.  It was called getting to know your teacher.  This is an activity that I would definitely do again.  Additionally it is an activity that I would be inclined to do with all of my first year classes.  I typed up 19 facts about "me", and made a PowerPoint presentation of pictures to go along with it.  The student took turns coming up and picking out one of the facts and then drawing it on a sheet of butcher paper.  During the activity I told the students that they may want to take notes because they will want to know these things... Needless to say no one choose to take notes and while being engaged they were not committing these things to knowledge.  The second half of this activity was a "pop" quiz the next day.  The students weren't super happy to find this out when they came into class on Thursday.  However, I told them that they could use their notes and the posters they created the day before.  I had several purposes to this activity and I really think it payed off!  After the students finished the quiz, I told them that the quiz would count and they sighed.  I then proceeded to tell them that 10 points would count and then other 10 were bonus points, they smiled.  I proceeded to then explain to them that everything counts and that if we are doing an activity that they need to be engaged like my expectations show.  I also told them that when I say they should "take notes" or that they "will want to know this" I do mean it and that taking notes may have advantages.  To finally get to my point the reason that I was the most pleased with this activity was its result.  After our "talk" I passed out a notes outlines for the lecture on ruminant digestion.  Every student took notes and was engaged in the lecture!

Friday however was the best!  It was lab time,  the students picked up packets as they entered the room.  They immediately engaged in the bell work, when the bell rang I started the video interest approach.  This worked really well, there was some chatter however when the video started it ended.  The answer to the bell work was in the video and at the conclusion we discussed it.  The cool thing was that I had several youtube videos that I wanted to show pieces and thanks to AEE413 I knew how to create one video!!  It worked great definitely a technique I plan to use in the future!  Following the video I had a series of questions that connected topics in the video to things from Thursdays class and to today's lab.  I then separated them into 3 groups and gave them instructions for completing the lab.  I designed the lab packets to reflect the problem solving approach, my focus was on critical thinking.  I noticed that the students were looking for easy answers and not digging into the material.  But that was not the case today!  My plan came together wonderfully, however if I get to teach it again I am going to set it up that I do an introductory lesson and give them all of the instructions and let them do one of the three stations on one day and then do the other two stations the next day.  This was something that I got a chance to discuss with my supervisor after the first two sections so when I taught the third section I only had the students work through two stations.  This gave me about 4-5 minutes at the end of class to bring them back to their seats and pull it all together before they left.  The three stations were determining energy content, determining dry matter and finally particle size.  This also happened to be my first observation visit and I could not have been happier with the results for it being my 4th day teaching!!

I am looking forward to next week and trying more new and interesting activities!