Back to School ----aahhhhhh!!!!

It is very hard to believe that next week we go back to school. Where did the summer go??

My blogging has been nonexistent and I feel terrible that I have neglected this part of my life for the past couple of months. Today I have happily been updating my TpT store with a couple of new products I have been working on over the summer. I am really excited to get back to school even though I don't feel like summer has been long enough. My to-do list did not get nearly enough crossed off from it yet, but I still feel like the plans I have for my classes are going to make for a great year.

On this years plans for new or significantly revised things...

• A bulletin board in my room to post assignments so that students who are absent can pick them up.
• Improved interactive notebooks for biology. Lots of new handouts, improved grading, better organization. We are going to rock science notebooks this year!
• Homework notebook for chemistry for review problems and I will be doing a weekly notebook "quiz". I am hoping this will help me cut down on the number of assignments I have to collect each week but still provide the needed motivation to complete practice problems.
• More chemistry labs - YAY! I got a huge chemical order in over the summer so some of my supply issues have been resolved!
• One of the things that I will be continuing to use is my daily catalyst and I have lots of new questions to use this year including some updated power point versions. Check those out on TpT - I posted 6 weeks worth of daily catalysts, in editable power point format. These work great with the FREE catalyst forms that students record a whole week of answers on!
• My awesome owl theme! Using lots of free clipart I found on TpT and fall décor that I found at a 50% off sale!
• Finally, as both a classroom management tool and extra credit opportunity I created a "Things to Do When I Finish Early" menu. Students will all have a copy of the chart and if they finish an assignment or task early and don't owe any make-up work they can complete one of the tasks for extra credit points. The idea here is that the tasks will keep students focused on science and occupied rather than sitting and waiting and potentially causing interruptions for students who are still working. This can also be found on TpT by following the link above.
• I also have started my own Teacher Binder where I have organized my calendar, to-do lists, class lists, IEP's, curriculum, meeting notes, etc. Each has its own tab and section. Yay for starting out super organized!

The first few weeks of school promise to be very busy and I hope that I can make all of my ideas and plans work. One thing that will help is that I only have two classes to prep for this semester (2 sections of biology, and 1 section of chemistry). Compared to previous years when I have had 3 or 4 different classes to prep, this should be a breeze!

Martian Genetics

I will probably never get around to posting about all the fantastic things that went on in my classroom at the end of the school year. However, as I am updating some files, reworking plans, and uploading a few new things to TpT I wanted to take some time to share about a few things.

Sooo, todays flashback - Martian Genetics!

Teaching genetics is one of my favorite units! I happen to LOVE doing punnet squares and probability, which probably makes me one of the few people who think that way. I have yet to find a student who is quite as excited about genetics as I am but I am hoping that some day it will happen. One of the activities that students have always really enjoyed regardless of how much they have liked or disliked genetics is my "Martian Genetics" activity. This is spin off of the classic Make-a-baby lab where you use coins to flip for traits. I walk students through 3 or more generations of Martians. Students determine their geneotype and phenotype and draw each martian using templates and lots of color. After each generation is created mating season occurs so that the next generation can come along. At the end of the activity students analyze the traits over time and look for patterns. To expand upon this and tie into the following unit on natural selection I will often end with creating a generation or two after some sort of natural disaster that impacts the population. This makes the analysis of population genetics over time much more interesting. The activity is wrapped up with a set of review questions. Throughtout the activity there is alot of discussion about dominance and recessiveness, incomplete dominance, co-dominance, meiosis, independent assortment, etc. I find it is a great review activity! Since it is a bit long I usually will split the activity into two or three sessions - since I work on block scheduling with 90 minute classes I try to do at least three different things during each class so we might do one generation of martians then go on to another activity.

So, I just finished updating this activity and typing out very detailed instructions so that I could post it to TpT. There is a sample file that can be downloaded for free and the complete activity is only $4.00 for the whole 20 page document! Follow this link to my TpT store to check out this awesome activity for your own biology classes!

Summr to do list...

I have a huge summer to do list for work, not to mention the fact that I am doing full time research and have a ton of house projects that I would like to get done as well. With so much on my plate I am hoping that sharing my goals will give me incentive to keep up with making progress on them.

So here is the list....

For my biology classes:

• Reorganize and touch up all unit calendars - some progress has been made
• Add unit project lists for remaining units that didn't get them this year
• Restructure/reorganize/improve the stream study plan so that it is a more meaningful research experience for students.
• Better plan for using and assessing journals and portfolios. I found some great resources on using interactive science notebooks that I think will really help me improve how I use this in my classroom!

For my chemistry classes:

• Reorganize and touch up all unit calendars
• Look at the chemical supply inventory and figure out where to add in more labs utilizing the new materials purchased for next year.
• Look into the forensics chemistry book and figure out how much of that I can implement

For my physics classes (2nd semester):

• More problem sets and reorganize notes

For my student research class (2nd semester):

• Make a plan....this will be the first time I am teaching this class. the intention is that during the first few weeks I will guide students through several experiences with the goal of teaching them how to design experiements and get their creative juices flowing. Then for as much of the time as possible they will be designing experiments and I will be more of a guide and resource for this. I need to come up with effective goals and assessment tools for this type of class. Any ideas would be appreciated!

Overal classroom needs:

• I am downloaded a ton of resources from TpT to do this cool owl theme for my classroom decoration. I also found some great resources for teacher binder organization - I love organizational tools despite how my desk looks most of the time. I so want to be that teacher that everyone is disguisted by how organized she is. I have a lot of work to do to get there!
• It wasn't on my original list but I have made a new homework log form!

And I am sure I will add more to these lists as I get going. It sounds like alot but the good news is that for many of the tasks it is more of a matter of improving what I already have not reinventing the wheel!

Last Day of School Huzzah!

I am breathing a huge sigh of relief tonight, the school year has officially come to a close. It has been a race to the finish line for the past few weeks. Between projects, lab reports, school plays, Key Club events, etc. I haven't had time to breath much less blog. I plan on taking the next week or so off and then will be spending alot of this summer of professional type things. I am participating in a RET program at Keene State College this summer in the biology department. I will be working as part of a team researching the impact of PAH's on Xenopus development, Xenopus are a species of frog commonly used as a model organism for biological research. I am really excited and can't wait to blog about the experience. I am also hoping over the summer to reorganize and revamp and many of my classroom materials specifically for biology and chemistry. Hopefully some of these things will be worthy of posting to my TpT store as I get them touched up. Ending my 4th year teaching I am finally starting to feel like I know what I am doing and that I can fine tune many of my lessons and activities. I always do an end of the year survey to get feedback from students and I got some comments and ideas that I def. plan to use next year in some way.


So long school year, hello summer!

Birthday Sale

I'm throwing myself a birthday party! Well, actually I am throwing myself a birthday sale!

Today through May 2nd everything in my TpT store is 10% off! Stop by and check out some wonderful science materials at a great price!

I'm still here

Sorry for the lack of posts for the last month. School has been busy with Key Club conferences, vacation week, school musicals, budgets, etc. etc. etc. My blog, TpT store, and personal life have all taken a backseat work for the last month. Next week the musical is performed so at least that will be one less thing on my plate.

With less than two months of school left I have so much that I want to get done still and I am running on fumes to try and make them happen! Today was one of those days were nothing went quite as planned. First block I had intended to do a photosynthesis lab using spinach leaves...forgot them! Plan B was to go to the computer lab to work on a presentation but NWEA testing is this week and so the computer lab was not available. So on to plan C....I went down to the kitchen and was able to get some lettuce from them, thinking that it would work the same way. To top it all off I could only find two of my syringes that were needed for the lab. Then come to find out the lettuce did not work! So after wasting a good 45 minutes of class time attempting to work out our activity we called it quits. Sooo tomorrow I am brining in the spinach and we are going to try this again.

Anyways, I will try to get back on the happy blogger train and get back into sharing things more often.

Glorious Saturdays!

This will end up being a rather long post - you have been warned.

First off just a few general updates. I haven't had much to share this past week, our school had our annual winter carnival this week. The kids had a great time, I advise the 10th grade and they tied for first place with the seniors. Everyone had lots of fun with games like flag football, hockey, pie eating, sled races, and much more. As a result I did not do a whole lot of teaching this past week.

So for my Successful Saturday Linky! As I said I did not do a whole lot of teaching this week - so I am pulling from our winter carnival for this entry. One of the challenges of being an advisor to a class is dealing with the personal differences between students and the inevitable drama that comes from being in a small school. The class that I work with has had their fair share of ups and downs. I took over as their advisor this year and the beginning of the year was pretty rough for some of them in terms of being able to work together well. Over the past many weeks I have seen an improvement in how they are working together. I think this years winter carnival was a good bonding opportunity and I saw students working together very well. A majority of the students organized a sleep over on Thrusday night to work on their class poster and dance routine for an event called the Mock Rock. The pulled off a first place winning Mock Rock and a very cool poster. It was great to see them working together so well and celebrating their success. I hope that they are able to carry the good feellings and motivation to work together through the rest of our school year.

Be sure to head over to "The Lower Elementary Cottage" and share your successes from this week.

My next order of business is sharing a wonderful Freebie on my TpT store. I am linking up again with "An Educators Life" for his bi-monthly freebie share. This week I am happy to be sharing a simple Lab RERUN form that is great for any science and could easily be used with grades 5-12. RERUN stands for ...

Recall – Summarize what you did in the lab.

Explain – Explain the purpose of the lab.

Results – Describe the results of the lab and what they mean.

Uncertainties – Describe what you are still uncertain about.

New – Write at least two new things that you learned from this lab.

 

It is a one page form that can be used at the end of a lab activity as a short report form that students turn in. For some activities this is the full extent of the write-up that students turn in. For other activities we fill out this form at the end of the activity so that the thoughts are recorded and students refer back to the form while writing up something more formal. Be sure to check out this and the many many other freebies being shared today - there is something for everyone.

 

 

 

 

Ok my long post is just about over. I have to get lots of school work done as next week will be very busy. I am hoping for a very busy week with my biology class. We will be pouring agar plates and sowing our C-Fern spores this week for their Planting Science projects. My physics class is starting 2D kinematics which can be a challenging topics, and the forensics class is starting DNA evidence.