I am so excited to be starting this new, Fall 2018 semester! I am so excited to learn as much as I can from Science methods. I have only positive experiences from my science teachers in grade school and I am excited to be able to bring science to life in my future classroom. The first day of class, we began by talking a little bit about what the course was going to look like. Shortly after, Dr.Parker brought the classroom some serious excitement with a series of minute to win it games. Right away I connected this to NCTCS Standard 4. Learning was facilitated for us right off the bat! We dove right in and played these games which incorporated various scientific aspects and standards. I thought this was such a fun and interactive way to make learning scientific principles fun. With our partner, we looked through NC science standards and connected each of our games to a standard. This was so beneficial and I loved that I got to learn how easily standards can be made exciting and come to life.
Secondly we learned about the Next Generation Science Standards. The acronym for this is called NGSS. This was my first time learning about this so its going to be important for me to really learn these standards. It was scary for me because I had never heard of the NGSS, or terms like cross-cutting. I was intimidated because I have never really been strong in science or math so these are subject areas that I have had to devote much more time to, ever since I was little. On the other hand, intimidating topics are a great thing for future teachers because if we challenge ourselves, we will continue to grow, and we will be able to bring vitality to our classroom and challenge our students. My favorite part of the week was the eco column. I am very, very scared of bugs, spiders, and snakes. I was glad that I only was going to have to see crickets and some fish. Going outside into the sunshine was awesome, and constructing the column was fun and new. As 21st century teachers, the amount of technological integration we have to partake in is epic and very massive. Being able to take it back a few steps and use raw and real materials was super awesome and fun for me. As we made these, we made mental notes to reflect on later. In this way, we were reflecting on our practice.
Next week, I am going to make steps towards furthering my science fair project with my group. We are trying to figure out what needs to be altered in our project because we just found out compost takes 2-4 weeks to break down. We want to be done before that so we are working on it. This week I tried to be as present as I could and to really hone in on science methods for the time that I was there. When we brainstormed about phenomena I tried to contribute my best to the class discussion and help my group brainstorm about the 4As and how we could put them into action. I hope I can help my class next week by keeping up positive energy, encouraging my classmates that will be student teaching next semester, and being fully present every class period.
tweets:
These are my tweets for the week. For my first tweet, It was from @teachers2teachers. This tweet was encouraging because it basically was just saying how everyone is overwhelmed when school first starts! For new teachers especially, everyone is in the same boat. That is a nice reminder.
For my second tweet, I read an article about how North Carolina's math scores have slowly declined over the past few years. This was interesting because their ELA scores have increased as well as pretty much stayed the same. As a hopeful future teacher, possibly in this state, is is interesting to note and study these statistics.
For my last tweet, I really liked the teachers2teachers tweet about the student who felt inspired by her teachers conversing about that could work better for the next time they taught the lesson. Reflecting on practice is so important!
Outside Research:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/future-will-people-have-enough-water-live
Since we have been on the topic of ecosystems, I read an article about how the lack of clean drinking water has been exponentially expanding throughout the world. Right now, 2 billion people lack safe drinking water daily. That number is only growing. It is hard for me to fathom how ungrateful I can be about very small things, when some people wake up every day and cannot even find safe water to drink. As a future teacher, being aware of worldly issues is important if am going to correctly implement NCTCS Standard 2, which is to establish a diverse and respectful learning environment.
