School is in session!!!!

Wow, it's hard to believe that the second week of student-teaching is almost over. This week in particular though has been an incredible experience. My first week of teaching. Now, ill be honest, there were some challenging parts this first week (Classroom Management and time mostly) but as someone once told me "If your completely comfortable with what your teaching, your doing something wrong", so using that advice, I tried to stretch myself.

Our "Carnation Coloration" Lab

For instance, this week I decided to try my first Inquiry Based Laboratory. In our lab, the students took different plants (celery and carnations), added food coloring and water, put the plants in the mixture and tracked changes in coloration. We let the plants sit overnight, and today, we looked at the coloration changes, as you can see from the picture, some of the celery has really taken up alot of the coloration.

Then as a class, we related this transport of nutrients, to not only the Xylem and Phloem present in plants, but also to Xylem and Phloem composition inside a stem. To make the lab more inquiry based, I had the students design their own charts, and decide together as a class, what outcome we wanted and what factors we should track. Overall the lab turned out pretty successful. While we are still waiting on a few pieces of celery and the carnations to change color (we're going to take a look at it again on Monday), much of the celery did change colors, as you can see below.

                                   

                                              Here are two pieces that changed color, one showing the red
                                           and the other showing the blue food coloring.

My Official Name Badge. I think that means I'm legit!!!

And today, while were not doing a lab in class, we had an impromptu session of root pictionary, where I drew different plants on the board, and they had to say what the plant was, and what kind of root system it had. While the potato was pretty easy to identify, the turnip on the other hand took them a little longer (or maybe it was my drawing skills). Either way, it made for a fun lesson on something that many might not consider a fun topic, roots.

I really am excited to be teaching now, and as I continue down this path, I am going to continue to try and make my classes as engaging and educating as possible. 

That reminds me, I gotta get back to class!!!!