Today I experienced my first MRVED MELT day. My first to session were on technology. Most of it was review for me, but I did learn about a few new tools which I am excited to try out in my classroom. Then for the third session I had signed up for Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity which was a two-hour session. As we were waiting for the presenters, the director came in and said that they didn't know where our presenters were. Now I had just taught a very basic lesson on sexual orientation to my 9th graders as part of the Family & Social Health Unit so as everyone was about to leave to find other sessions to join I spoke up and asked what it was that they all wanted to learn about this topic. I then explained that I had just taught a lesson on this topic and that if they wanted to stay I could walk them through this topic using the same presentation. Luckily I have almost everything online or on Google Drive so I just logged into Emaze and started the presentation. For the first hour we walked through the presentation and I explained some of the terms and answered questions. Then for the second hour, which I wasn't thinking we would need or that people would attend, after lunch break I showed the video "Love is All You Need" video and then discussed my health curriculum. I was impressed because almost all of the class showed up for the second half of my unplanned presentation. This was my first time presenting to a group of other educators that were not my classmates in a college setting and I received a ton of wonderful feedback! People said that they got a lot of out of my presentation and that they liked my down-to-earth style. Towards the end of the session one of the teachers said that "I would be busy next year because they will want me to be presenting again". Hearing that made me happy because I love sharing what I am doing in my classroom and sharing my knowledge with others. My new signature for my school email! And my last brilliant idea for the day:
In Health We PET! Practice Empathy Eliminate Ignorance Take Initiative
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I am pretty proud of my class website so I thought I'd share that with everyone here! I used Weebly to make this site (I love weebly). I choose Weebly because there were no ads, it looks professional, it is not cluttered, and it has an easy to use interface for designing/creating. Each class has its own tab where I embed a weekly document with what we did in class, papers given out, and assignments turned in or assigned during that week. Also along the side of each classes blog I keep class specific links such as for class recordings, turn in dates for notebooks, etc. I have a resources page that I have links to all kinds of things that students need access to frequently such as AR Test, online grade book, school website, Achieve 3000, etc. Below I have included screen shots of my website as well as link to my site if you'd like to check it out for yourself!
So I realize I have not posted in a while, but this first year has proven to be crazy! So far it's going pretty well but between online classes and being a first-year teacher I do not have much spare time. So here is a quick post about the RAK project I started with all of my classes. Below I have embedded the Tackk I created to introduce the project to my classes.
I’m pretty excited to see how this goes over! The picture to the left is of what we have so far (I haven't introduced it to Health 9 yet). I came up with this idea called Random Acts of Kindness or RAK on our first snow day of the school year. I twitted the header picture (from the Tackk) with the quote on the snow day to peak student’s interest and then on the next day they had class I explained what we were doing and how it fit with the quote. The basics of the contest are that they write down, on slips of paper, RAKs that they have done and then I go through them by grade level and add them to the grade level chains. Whoever has the longest chain will win a prize. This project ties in nicely with the 9th grade Family & Social health unit but I wanted to expand it to all grade levels as well because I thought it would be beneficial for them as well. If you want more details be sure to check out the embedded Tackk!
I think this pictures quote fits nicely with what the article above is all about. This is my goal for this year. I know everything won’t be perfect but in the end students will not remember what I taught them, they will remember how I made them feel. I want them to be excited to be in class because they know I’m excited that they are there. I want them to feel good about who they are and who they will become. I want them to know that we will all make mistakes together and that we will learn and grow wiser from them. I want them to know each day is a new day and that we only get one chance at each day so we need to make the best of it. I want them to see that I care about them and get excited about learning because they see that I am excited about learning. When the days get tough, I will come back to these thoughts to remind myself of this goal. Now that my classroom is mostly set up, I've started thinking about actually teaching real students by myself! As that first-day quickly approaches, I found this article and I know I want to keep this advice in mind throughout my first year as a teacher. If you want to take a read I have the link below.
I also spent a day making these floor pillows for my classroom with my Aunt, Grandma, and Mother. I LOVE how they turned out! The Oven Lovin' is where I got the idea from and then I made some alterations to fit my needs. I bought huge premade plain pillows from JoAnn fabrics that had zippers. My reasoning behind having zippers on the inside pillow was so that I can restuff the pillows because they will most likely get flat or lumpy as the year goes on. For the outside, I picked out a few different fabrics as you can see in the pictures, sewed the sides together and put in a big metal zipper on one side so that I can take the outside off to watch it. As promised here are some pictures from my classroom as it is right now. For each picture, in the caption area, I wrote down details about what is being shown in the pictures. My room is not completely done, but this is a good selection of the different parts of my room. It looks so much better already! This is the room that no one wanted this year and I can understand why. I did not look very inviting, but I've had a few teachers pop in see it and they have said it looks way better which I am proud of!
I've had a lot to sort through from prior teachers which has made this process even longer. At this point, I have decided to stop because it's getting very overwhelming and then around midway through the year, once I know better what I am doing and what my curriculum will be, I will finish sorting/re-sorting through everything. As I am busy working on getting my classroom organized and set up before the start of the school year I started thinking back to student teaching. This image was my “theme” for student teaching & I believe it still applies now for my first year as a teacher! I’ve got a lot to get done before the start of the school year, but I’m excited to get started! I will be posting pictures of my classroom sometime soon hopefully. I am guessing I will change my mind a million times and rearrange things as the year goes on, but I want to get some pictures on here to share with everyone! I know a lot of my ideas I got from reading other's blogs so I hope that mine can be an inspiration to other teachers! |
AuthorI teach 7-9 Health Education & Computer 7 in rural southwestern Minnesota. I love using technology in my classroom and teaching students about how to live healthy and informed lives.
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