Making observations!

The blog drought is OVER! It's time to get back into the groove with a new school year and new adventures!

I really have mixed feelings about the beginning of the year. I love the newness (supplies, clothes, teachers), but I dislike the constant reminders about procedures. Spending a class period reviewing when to sharpen pencils, etc is not my idea of fun! However, it's necessary work. The more we prepare, practice, and reinforce those procedures at the beginning, the more fun my year will be in April!

As a science teacher, I really work hard to get my students to make good observations. Saying that an object is brown, isn't really good enough in my opinion. As a 7th grader, more developed observations should be made. So as a result, I've spent a lot of time going over what a good observation looks like and what a "not-so-good" observation looks like.

As a fun way to observe living things, and to escape the hot/humid classroom, we trekked outside to observe the natural environment around the school. I had my students take their composition notebooks outside (no need for clipboards with those things) and they had to be in my sight and at least an arm's length away from another person. In the future, it will definitely be more like 2 or 3 arm's lengths - I don't know how middle schoolers find each other, but they are like magnets. We made observations on a beautiful August day for about 40 minutes which was a perfect way to break up the block time!