Two Full weeks in the Bag… NASA Grant

Title says it all, we finally finished two full weeks. And wow, it has been flying by. Every time I look up at the clock at school, the day is almost over and I can never cover everything I want to cover. Oh well!

Let’s see where should I start first…Oh well we had our dedication and my creative video crew did an awesome job covering the Mass. They also did a great job interviewing the Bishop, you can see the interview on Youtube.  After dedication we then had parent/teacher night. The next day we were at the Friday Institute on NC State Campus doing a professional development. Yep I think it was a busy end of the August.

September came like a flash, I’m still trying to figure out where it all went. A couple of things that have happened, number one on the list is we received a mini grant from NES (NASA explorers school). Totally unexpected didn’t think it would happen. We applied knowing that eventually the cuts were coming and there would be no money left. (Which might still happen with gov’t shut down).  Hopefully, I say this because of the gov’t situation right now, we will be able to get our EV3’s and other Lego equipment. This year we have a room dedicated to Robotics and Science Olympiad. Its pretty awesome and at some point I will post pictures. In the room I’m hoping to have the Lego’s set up so they can be used during lunch periods etc.. With the purchase we are hoping to build an outreach with middle school children. We are incorporating the Green City sets into our Earth Day/Sustainability Day celebration and our Science Festival in January ( more on that in a later blog entry). Can’t wait to start getting this going and begin our little outreach endeavor.

I have pretty much decided to flip all of my Forensic class. It allows me to cover more material in class by doing different activities. The students are loving it. They said they like that class is made up of doing various activities and less lecture. They did however ask me to to make sure that there were worksheets to go along with the vodcasts.  And students haven’t been doing to bad on their assessments. Cool internet tool to use in Forensics is the CSI Web Adventure, it shows a variety of instruments used in the lab to analyze evidence. I gave students a work sheet that I created for the website and they dived into investigating the website.

I’ve been doing a good deal of whiteboarding in class and it has been successful. I still have to get it to a point that students are participating and getting something out of it.  I started using an exit tool, like a parking garage. Students posted their questions on post its and then posted them on poster paper. I had students do this just before the test, and went over all their questions at the beginning of class. Scores were pretty good, some did really well while others need improvement. I’m going to do this again but try a different format, maybe Padlet.

Another idea for class, is doing the Earth Science Week Photograph contest.  Still working on how I’m going to implement this. Meanwhile, this week is spirit week so we decided to do a scavenger hunt at school on Friday. We hope to have Physics and Earth Science students working together to find solutions to questions using GPS. Should be fun!

Hopefully, I have caught up on some of the happenings around my class. I haven’t done a parent newsletter in a while but hopefully that will come. Look for futures blogs on the Literacy Project, Science Festival and other happenings.