Dear Classroom,

Year 6 was hard, harder than any other year. This year I taught 3 different preps, all in chemistry but different levels. My Chemistry 2 students pushed me to be a better teacher. They were always curious, always interested, and always wanted to understand why, and that was wonderful! This was my first year to teach CP Chemistry (college prep) and the pace was very different; fast. The students learned what I asked of them but I wasn’t very happy with what I was asking. There just wasn’t enough time to do what I would’ve liked to do with that class. And lastly my Chemistry 1 students; these kiddos pushed me to build better teacher-student relationships. I’ve never met a group quite like them. Labs required too much work. Lectures required too much writing. Task cards took too much time. Assignments had too many questions. You mean we have to look it up in our notes?! Watched ‘The Bomb’ documentary to extend nuclear chemistry concepts and I get, “Why should we care? It’s just a bunch of old people talking about something that happened forever ago.” My response? *@?!#@%* Needless to say, it was frustrating. Most days I managed behaviors rather than teach. Parent contact helped sometimes, but you can only contact parents and administrators for the same behaviors so many times before you just give up. Then I would get frustrated with giving up, and I’d try again. It was exhausting, and there were tears (by both me and the students). We openly acknowledged their dislike for chemistry but tried pushing them anyways. I know all parties involved were happy summer finally came. lol 

Despite the crazy, I love, love, love that group of students. Every single one of them. From the students that would never sit in their seat, to the students who never stopped talking. I learned what they loved, where and how often they worked, after school activities, made deals for retweets, became more creative with assignments, and so much more. I was very aware of the hardships in their lives, and would attempt to work with them to find solutions on how to keep up with their class work.  I saw how much they cared for each other, and the support they’d give each other. It was beautiful to watch and be a part of. It was a great reminder that the students in my room are so much more than bad chemistry students. They are smart, caring young men and women, and will do and accomplish many amazing things, it just won’t be in chemistry. lol  I will miss them, and hope that maybe one day they won’t hate chemistry (even if that is wishful thinking lol). Continue reading →

Science Centers: a hands-on approach to learning, that encourages students to experiment and explore using interactive activities. My thoughts about using science centers in my classroom began with my daughter and how she learns. Here’s a little back story:

My daughter is a very energetic child that has a hard time focusing. Pre-K was repeated because of this (which was one of the hardest parental decisions I’ve had to make so far but boy did it make a difference!). Year 1 in Pre-K students learned their letters based on the order of the alphabet; seems logical right? I mean, we say the letters in a particular order so why not learn them that way? But have you ever stopped to think why letters are in that order? Does it really matter? The answer is no, it doesn’t matter. We’ve put letters into alphabetical order for so long that the reason we continue to do so is simply because that’s the way it has always been done. Now put yourself in the shoes of a 4-year-old. Doing something “simply because that’s the way is has always been done” doesn’t really interest you. You want to explore the world around you. That’s how you learn and very rarely is this done in a logical order. Learning “a” then “b” and now “c” and finally all those letters mixed together to spell something called a “word” can be overwhelming! This is what happened to my daughter. She wanted to learn. She tried very hard to learn but learning this way did not work for her. So we repeated Pre-K, this time in a new District where learning was done differently. At this new school students would move to different centers when learning. My daughter had options of drawing the letter, coloring the letter, and recognizing the letter in words that had meaning to her (mom, friends, names, etc…). This made a HUGE difference in my daughters success at school.

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