Week 12: Students Building Connections To The Real World

This week has been full of many exciting projects and aspects of teaching! I am extremely sad to be giving classes back to my cooperating teachers as these students have been fantastic to teach! In many of my classes, we were able to create unique projects to apply and connect our learning to the real world! Check out some of the highlights from this past week! 

My Landscape Design class started off very quiet when I started teaching many weeks ago. As I began to build deeper connections with each student, I was amazed to see their personalities shine through in the final project for them to complete while I taught that class. These students had to apply our plant selection knowledge, principles of design, and the outdoor room concept in the creation of a personalized landscape design! After their drawing was completed, they were challenged to bring their creation to life in a 3D model of their design! These students stepped up to the challenge and surely brought their individual personalities to their projects! What a great way to end teaching this class and I am so incredibly proud of their growth over the past few weeks! 

                         

Another highlight was in my Intro to Ag course through the application of our wildlife identification unit! We explored the woods around the school to practice identifying the local wildlife in Gettysburg! The mud certainly did not stop these students from taking advantage of the opportunity to explore the woods! These students not only identified various tracks, scat, and markings but were able to find a skull as well! We used our knowledge about factors to look at to narrow what species this skull belongs to! What a great way to test our wildlife knowledge in some fun exploration! 

My Animal Care and Horticulture classes work just as hard this week to also relate to and understand the content from this week's lessons! Whether it was through the creation of unique review games to the comparison of real fertilizers used in the greenhouse, these classes certainly amazed me with their deep learning this week! 

As my time here in Gettysburg is winding down, I certainly have some more goals that I would like to achieve! I would like to continue to bring diversity into my lessons to continue to enhance the learning objectives for each week. I also am striving to incorporate FFA and SAE in my instruction for the remaining 3 weeks of student teaching. This has certainly been an exciting journey and I am motivated to continue to grow and finish strong!