March 28th

This week was a very exciting week in my classrooms. In Horticulture, my students started with fertilizer, and growing media but spent the majority of the week in the greenhouse transplanting plants. The delivery of flowers came in on Monday, as a result, Tuesday and Wednesday were spent in the green house transplanting flower plugs to individual pots. This gave me time to talk with students and build rapport with them. I really enjoy days like that because one, its easy to plan and execute, but you also get to talk with students and see what they are interested in. Needless to say, I learned a lot about chickens.

My second period class finished up their soil unit. It seemed like they fully enjoyed texturing play doh and learned how to ribbon soil. I was surprised how well the unit went with them since most of it lecture and not as much hands on activities. This week, I am looking to incorporate more activities with the water cycle since this class surprised me with how much they know. What I thought would take 2 days, took about 20 minutes since the students already had the lessons in their 8th grade environmental class. So like any other teacher, we reviewed it once I was done with lesson. I was prepared for 2 days since most other student teachers in my cohort were having a hard time grasping the concepts of the water cycle. However, I quickly learned that these students already had it. And whoever taught them did a great job since the students retained the information very well.

Advanced FFA leadership finished their speech unit with grades this week. It is amazing to see how far they came and how well they did at the speaking contest. The students have been working extremely hard on their speeches and presented it every chance they had. Out of the 22 students who went to the contest 7 of them are moving on to Regional to compete. Even though I am excited to see how well they did and how far they came, its hard to compete with  how happy I am to be done grading rough drafts.

Welding class continued to complete welds for grades and move on to the final week of class. Unfortunately, they were not able to start on the class project due to limited time in the shop and a high number of welds to be completed. I would have loved to complete the class project, however the students did not complete any of their class project plans or complete their welds. As a result, the class project could not be carried through.

Next week I begin my community based unit of instruction with the barn owl initiative. Stay tuned for the latest!!!