Sayonara Science & Smirnova

The semester is now over and I just wanted to write a final closing blog for now. This class has taught me so much and opened my eyes and mind up to different techniques and practices for my future classroom. This class was definitely not easy. You need to put in long hours and pace yourself if you wish to succeed. As I wrap up this semester I want to thank my colleagues and Dr. Smirnova for all of the things you taught me. Now when I look at a group of students I will always hear in my head "do not say guys" and thus I will be more professional. To future students taking this class good luck and just know it will all be worth it in the end. Dr. Smirnova is one of my favorite professors now and I am lucky enough to continue to build a relationship with her through Kappa Delta Pi, the Education Honor Society at the Mount. I accepted Membership chair of the society and look forward to spending many more Saturdays with her! Until next time bloggers!

Getting Jiggy With Life Science!

This week was all about Life Science! To learn this topic we used a technique called Jigsaw teaching! Until now I have never heard of a jigsaw activity, but i'm glad now that I know. This activity is good for breaking up a broad topic.Everyone in the class was broken up into groups. This is called your base group. Then each member of the group chose an animal kingdom. Once everyone chose the animal kingdoms group separated into expert groups. The expert group works together on their given topic to learn as much as they can. Once they feel that they have mastered the topic, each classmate returns to their base group to teach them their expertise. I really enjoyed this activity because it taught me the information I needed to know without being overloaded and having to go in-depth for each subtopic. Every group did a great job teaching the class about their expertise!!

Saturday Fun (ET)4ALL

This Saturday I spent yet another day of my weekend with the great Dr. Smirnova. This conference was the Educational Technology for Authentic Life Long Learning. The first keynote speaker was someone who teaches teachers. Weird to say, I know, but what she said was amazing. She talked about how everything is on the internet now a days and you have to stay cautious of what you post on this massive world wide web. She also gave insight on how to incorporate technology into classrooms!

The first workshop I attended was "Going Google." The instructor informed me that many schools are moving away from office 365 and towards Chrome. This was a surprise to me because I grew up using school computers and was very familiar with the office 365 software. She then went in depth about the numerous components Google offers educational professionals. One in which is called Google Classroom. This allows the teacher to communicate with students and parents online. I think it is very important for teachers to have a class webpage so parents can know what is going on. Most days parents ask their child "How was your day?" and the child simply responds "good." With Google Classroom parents will have insight to what their child did throughout the day. This is also good for students who have a tendency for forgetting homework at school or lying and saying they have none. The teacher can post the nights homework on the site that way everyone has access.

Following the Google Workshop there was a group workshop presented by Susan Oxnevad an Education Director of ThingLink. ThingLink is my favorite tool to use in the classroom and after hearing Susan speak even more in depth my love grew! There are so endless ways to incorporate ThingLink into your classroom.

The third workshop I went to was my absolute favorite of them all. This workshop focused on Virtual Reality or VR. I have always heard about it, but never had the chance to experience it myself...well until yesterday! Once I put the goggles on I was in awe. I had left the classroom and entered a whole new world. I instantly thought about how I could incorporate VR into the classroom. When doing a science lesson on a particular climate/animal/body system, you can have your class travel as if they're there experiencing it all on their own. One example I saw was the circulatory system. As you have the goggles on you are inside a human body with blood cells flowing all around you. This VR technology is fast on the rise and will be an awesome tool to have in the classroom one day!

Thank you KDP for hosting this wonderful event!

Astronauts, Meteors, Planets Oh My!

This week class was out of this world!!.. Literally. The topic we focused on this week was space science. Outer Space is a topic that is so vast. You can focus on the United States and the space race or you can focus on the planets. The ideas are endless. As a class we were each required to create a scrap book of articles all about space. I made my digital scrapbook using Glogster. You can find my glog HERE! These articles are all from Newsela and interested me in different aspects of space. After creating our scrapbooks of articles we were then separated into groups. As a group we brainstormed which topics and words came up the most often in our articles as well as what interested us. With these words we created a word cloud to display all of the words! Word clouds are great to introduce a topic, you can ask students what looks familiar and what does not. A word cloud could then lead into a KWL chart. Students can list the words they already know, the words the want to know and then finally after the lesson they will write the new words they learned. The next task for our group was to create a timeline of space based on some of the words. As a group we split up the words evenly and got straight to work researching. We each found one or two popular events regarding the word/ concept to add to our timeline. Our timeline was created using Tiki-toki an online resource that allows you to make 3D timelines! Once we finished our timeline and viewed it, it was as if we were actually traveling through time starting with the big bang going all the way to present day! What a cool idea for teaching history you can "time-travel" as a class!

All Life on Earth is One

This week our class focused on teaching Earth science. In preparation for this I read some articles and the textbook to gain more insight on Earth science. Each student was then asked which topic they knew the least about to then research further into the topic. My group chose Earth's oceans. I had no idea we had 5 oceans on Earth. After researching I found out a lot about the oceans, the currents and the marine life within. In order to teach my class about Earth Science, my group decided to create a ThingLink. Here you can find our ocean ThingLink. This activity was a great way to refresh my Earth science knowledge learning from my own research as well as from the teachings of my peers. One fact I found to be the most interesting about our oceans is that 97% of all Earth's water is found in the oceans! I really enjoyed learning Earth science topics this week! 

24th Annual CELL Literacy Conference

The Annual CELL Literacy Conference is my favorite event MSMC hosts each year. This year the keynote speaker was Susan L. Roth. She is the author and illustrator of over 50 books. When she started her talk she didn't say a word. We just watched in awe as she took different fabrics, papers and scraps and transformed it into a beautiful image. I am someone who loves art and watching her really inspired me because you don't need expensive materials you can make beautiful pictures using the bare minimum and that is exactly what Susan does in her books. She then went on showing all different images from her books that she has created. One of my favorites was from her book Parrots Over Puerto Rico. The vibrant shades of blues and greens really stood out to me and her ability to capture such a beautiful bird using just paper was amazing. This form of turning scraps into pictures is called collaging and it is something I look forward to trying in the future. Susan spoke about how she was inspired to write some of her books and spoke of her passion for traveling. Many of her books take place in countries outside the United States.

After the keynote, we went straight to our first workshop. The workshop I attended was: Stories of “3” Come to Life. This geared towards early childhood grades and I enjoyed it very much. As someone who is going to school to be an early childhood educator I have read my fair share of The Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and The Three Bears and The Three Billy Goats Gruff stories. There are so many different versions and so many different activities you can do with these stories. One activity I particularly liked was changing the ethnicity of Goldilocks. When you change Goldilocks' ethnicity you also change the clothing she is wearing, the type of food she tries eating, the style of the home she goes into and so much more. I think this activity is great for students of all different ethnicities to make connections to the character of the book.

The second workshop I went to was: Full STEAM into Reading: An After School Library Program. This workshop focused on different activities that make a connection between science and literacy. Some of the activities included spice painting, story jenga, crystal trees and exploring colors. Each science activity was paired with a book. My favorite station was the crystal trees station. Here you were given the necessary materials to make a crystal tree. The activity was paired with Dr. Seuss' The Lorax. If I were to do this with a class I would first read them the story and talk about the importance of conserving our trees, then talk with the students to see what they can do to help our environment. As a closing activity we would "grow" our own indoor crystal tree. The class would then be asked to draw their own picture of the tree and write a story based on if we had crystal trees instead of green trees like we do now.

Project Learning Tree

This weekend MSMC offered a FREE hands on Pre K-Grade 8 Science/Interdisciplinary Workshop! I attended the workshop and gained so much knowledge I cannot wait to use in my classroom one day. We started the morning off playing an "ice breaker" bingo activity. We had to go around the room trying to find someone who matched a space on our bingo board. The catch to this game was each space was related to nature in some way. On each game board I was able to sign off for having a tree house! I thought this was cool because I seemed to be the only one with one. This was a great way to get to know the people we would be spending the day with and their personal takes on nature.

Immediately after the ice breaker we jumped into a new activity involving tree cookies. A tree cookie is a piece of the tree that has been cut off from either the trunk or branch of the tree.We learned how to tell how old the tree is from counting the rings on the cookie and also learned different parts of the cookie. The instructors then linked it to literacy as we drew our own tree cookie based on our lives so far. If you had a really great year in your life you made the space between each ring larger because that meant you flourished and had great growth at that point in your life. I thought this was a great way students can plan  what they are writing based on their drawing of their tree cookie. It is a great way to brainstorm and organize thoughts and ideas before writing. This activity can also be linked to social studies in which you can create a tree cookie for a country to show the years they flourished as to they years they did not. A tree cookie is like natures own timeline!


Another activity we did was creating tree "fashion." Each group used a brown paper bag to represent the trunk of the tree filled with different parts of the tree inside. This was a great way for us to really get to know the different parts of a tree and expand our knowledge. We then wore our vests and hats for the rest of the group to see.

My favorite activity from the workshop was the "Peppermint Beetle." The Peppermint Beetle encourages students to use their sense of smell and other techniques to find the beetle. This activity can be done with any strong scent you wish. All you have to do is place the scent on different objects around the yard leading up to the hidden beetle.

All in all today was a very successful workshop. I enjoyed all of the activities we participated in and will be sure to use them in my classroom one day. I think it's amazing how science can be connected to all different subjects in all kinds of ways. The free book we received will be an excellent resource as well.