Recently I was approached by my friend and fellow teacher Mr. Lamshed about participating in a collaberation project. Of course I jumped on board and was eager to begin (despite my late post). This project is a blog that myself, Mr. Lamshed, Mr. C, and several others are all contributors of. Often when it comes…

Today we continued our discussion about insects in preparation for our lab with cockroaches later this week. Students were able to identify insects from non-insects by looking at their characteristics. An insect consists of a head, thorax, abdomen, and six legs. Students were also able to identify different adaptations of insects. The picture above is…

We have a Tie Tuesday Hall of Fame first! Today we are inducing our first female student to the TTHF! Macy is in my homeroom and is always excited when Tie Tuesday rolls around. Macy called claims on her dad’s best tie at the beginning of the semester, and has been wearing it every Tuesday…

Today we began our introduction to insects. We studied the began by studying the basic overview of the make up of an insect. We learned that there are three basic parts that make up all insects Head (the control center of the insect) Thorax (in control of movement) Abdomen (where the guts are stored) In…

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…