Growing the Extra Mile

Hi everyone! It is crazy to think that we have officially made it 1/3 of the way through this semester. This semester has been, and will continue to be, filled with high-impact learning experiences that have helped me grow as a future educator. These experiences have kept me busy, however, I know that this will all serve me well in the future.  In Week 5 of AEE 412, we focused our lab experience on interest approaches. An interest approach is a brief activity, typically used at the beginning of a learning experience, to stimulate students' interest towards a topic. Interest approaches are a very important part of any lesson, however, for me, they can also be the most difficult.  For this lab, I decided to highlight the interest approach from lesson 7 of my Rabbit Production Unit, titled "What are common rabbit breeds?". This interest approach was an observation activity for my students. I had posted pictures of various rabbit breeds around the room and tasked students wit...

Hi everyone! I know what you're all probably thinking, "Why is Mckenzie talking about the first day of school when she's already in week four?". Well, that's because the first day is SUPER important in setting up your students and classroom for success. It is the first chance for you to set expectations and procedures in your classroom and for students to get a true sense of who you are as a teacher. As a preservice educator, it is very important to consider what I will do on the first day of class so that I get off on the right foot.  Lucky for me, this week in 412, we had the opportunity to create a lesson plan for what we would do on our first day of school and deliver 10 minutes worth of content from that plan in front of a group of our peers. I chose to create my first day lesson for the 9th grade ag sciences course that I will be teaching this spring. Follow along with this lab and I will take your through some of the post-lab reflections I had!  Making Lab ...

 Hi everyone! It has been a busy, yet rewarding first three and a half weeks of classes, but it feels so nice to finally be into the "groove" of what classes happen when and what is expect of me on a weekly basis. As we have been working through these first few weeks, we have also been working through our first large assignment. This assignment was for AEE412: Methods of Teaching Agriculture and was titled "Model Unit Plan". For this assignment, we were tasked with writing one unit plan and submitting it for two rounds of peer review.  I decided to write a unit plan titled "Exploring the Poultry Industry and Local Production Processes", which I will be teaching at Biglerville this spring during my student teaching experience. I chose to write this unit plan because it is a topic that I am somewhat comfortable teaching as far as content, but I felt as though there was still plenty of room for growth.  As I started unit planning, I found it to be a little ov...