Slow week last week of blogging last week, but back at it again this week. The past two weeks we have been working up a couple of rough drafts in my communication arts class, one of these is a story using Scholastic Story Starters. Story Starters is a application that give students a topic and…

This morning a colleague shared with me a wonderful link to a very valuable resource for teaching the scientific method. The website is simply titled ‘Scientific Method Web Page’, the website was developed by Mr. Dan Tripp, an eMINTS teacher at Hoech Middle School located in St. Louis, Missouri. Mr. Tripp has developed a wonderful…

After MAP testing today, I decided to take time to watch the movie Super Size Me as a class. This movie is a documentary about a man named Morgan Spurlock. Spurlock is a normal healthy person until he decides to test the effects of eating McDonald’s for 30 straight days (breakfast, lunch, and dinner). Needless…

As a part of our diversity of life unit in science, one of our objectives is to introduce the concept of adaptation by pointing out the structure and behaviors of an insect and how it relates to those adaptations. The insects we are using are Madagascar Hissing Roaches, and as you might guess classroom has…

Today we continued our discussion about The Cornell Note-Taking System. We used our discussion about the pollination of a flower to help use better understand the system. This lesson was a little bit different than any in my class before, today we went full audio and full video for a 45 minute lesson. This is…

“The best ideas are always stolen”After reading Mr. C’s post about note-taking, I was inspired to spread to the good word of note-taking to my students today. We took time out of our science schedule today to study The Cornell Note-taking System. Forty years ago, Walter Pauk (1989) developed what is known as the Cornell…

Where does the water go? that is the question that I asked my students Monday when we started our lesson about transpiration. We water, water, and water plants all the time, but what happens to the water? We decided to answer this question by using celery. Day 1 – Weight the celeryStudents were able to…

….everyone else is doing it! In my graduate classes the topic of technology in the classroom has presented itself numerous times in the past two weeks. The classes I am taking are educational research and educational psychology courses. Both of these classes are offered as a “hybrid class”, meaning that one week we meet online…