Week 9: The Final Countdown

This week was a pretty great week, not a single delay, early dismissal, or cancelation! Spring is finally on its way! My NRM students are seeing their final product for their monitoring station and even got o sit on it this Friday! It was great to see their faces and the excitement they expressed after they saw what the final product is going to look like! I am really proud with the way they have been working together and putting any extra time they can into finishing this project! We also introduced our next project by having a Skype session with Barb Kurtz with the Keystone Elk Country Alliance. We will be creating Forage Plot Management Plans for the Visitor Center to use and implement on the many plots that they manage.

 

In Ag Science, we have been learning about cells and comparing plant and animal cells. We were in the lab almost everyday. On Wednesday, the students did well in the lab for our Nuclear Onion Lab where students looked at onion cells and stained he nucleus using iodine so they could see the nucleus under the microscope. This was one of my personal best lesson using CASE and I did a full lab demo before having the students work on their labs. The next day we did a lab were we extracted DNA from frozen fruit and precipitated it in a solution so that we could see the DNA strands with the naked eye. The students did not follow procedures and kept messing around the lab rather than actually focusing on their work. I had to speak to almost all of the groups about staying on task several times during the lab. At the end of class I spoke to them all about following lab procedures and if they could not do as the lab stated without messing around they would no longer be able to participate in labs. I was very stern with them and didn't really like it to much, but after speaking with Mrs. Weaver, it was something that had to be said.

Horticulture this week was a little rough, we started our Botany Unit, which is definitely not my strong suit. I have been doing my best to make sure that I understand the content beforehand and making sure the lessons run smoothly. For the most part I did pretty well for the first part of the week, but for Friday's lesson I did not have time to set up before the start of lab and realized that I didn't have some of the necessary equipment for the lab we were supposed to do! I spoke to Mrs. Weaver and we came up with a game plan for the class during our prep. The class ran smoothly despite of our last minute plans. It just goes to show that you always have to be flexible and even when you think things are running smoothly, something always comes up!