Weird Animal Wednesday

And Then It Hit Me

I am excited to share an idea I came up with this summer while walking through a cornfield during
detasseling. There is something about the monotony of staring at corn that lets your mind wander. I do most of my school year planning in the cornfield and come up with my best ideas there as well. I was already sleep deprived from Briggs interrupting my daily naptime with his cuteness, which usually gives me reckless confidence that all my ideas are great. So my idea still has to pass the ultimate test, which is student interest, but nonetheless I'm pretty jacked about it.

Teacher Goals

In my first 3 years of teaching I have noticed several areas that I want to improve on for this year. Some of these I have noticed while others have been pointed out by administration or my peers.

Goal #1.
One issue that our entire district is striving to improve is writing skills. In my opinion, writing a blog is a great way to achieve that goal. First, it gets students writing in sentence and paragraph form in
science. It also gives students an audience where they can get feed back from people other than their teacher. I have tried this in previous years and was met with limited success. (Here is a poster I made about the writing process)

Goal #2.
Something that I think is very important is for my students to get connected with scientific experts. For example, I know a little about nudibranchs but not as much as someone who has dedicated years of his or her life to the topic. These experts have the unique ability to get sophomores excited about learning science. It's really easy for us to connect on Skype and talk for 10-15 min. Another benefit is that for most students, their only exposure to scientists is their teachers. I don't want any students to be turned off to science because they don't like me. These experts just give students another opportunity to see that science is AWESOME!!

Goal #3
In my opinion, the coolest thing about biology is the animals. Our NeSA standards emphasize cellular processes, which is pretty awesome, but it is at the expense of learning about animals. I have always wanted to teach more than just my 2 week Ecology unit.

Weird Animal Wednesday

I have come up with a plan that will accomplish all these goals. This year, every Wednesday, my students will be posting blogs about various animals on Kidblog. Let me show you an example(click here to be able to access the links on the document:

I am still looking for an octopus expert, so if you know any octopus researchers who want to share their expertise they can contact me in the comments or on twitter. (@brandon_timm) Here is a visual I made to share on twitter.

I would love to see how other teachers connect with scientists in their classrooms! Feel free to share your strategies or opinions in the comments!