Friday, September 9, 2011

Welcome to Mrs. J's life science class!

Students came in this year, as they do every year, so excited. With brand new packages of pens and pencils, new notebooks and binders, students entered room 205. As they entered, my new students stopped to peer at the netted cylinder that stood on our front demonstration table. To them it looked like a laundry hamper with leaves at the bottom. “Are we composting?” “What’s in here?” “Hey! What’s on the top?” “Oh, cool!”

Curiosity does not always come easily in a classroom setting. Students tend to think that it is uncool to show interest in their school work. But it is essential to create an environment where students can be inquiring. So a few days before school was supposed to start I had gone out to local meadows to collect monarch butterfly caterpillars. We have 13. The caterpillars were fed with milkweed daily. They grew quickly and before a week had past several had climbed up the long expanse of netting in our butterfly habitat. Several have already formed into their smooth green chrysalis. It won’t be long now until our monarch butterflies emerge. Once the butterflies have stretched and dried their wings and are ready to fly we will tag them with special labels provided by Monarch Watch, an educational outreach program based at the University of Kansas. Once released, the monarchs will make their long migration toward Mexico. Scientists in Mexico will be collecting many of the butterflies and when they find some with labels this information will be recorded and entered into a monarch butterfly database.

So our year has started strong, with prepared and curious students. This week was all about students getting to know each other, their classroom and their textbook. On Wednesday night the assignment was to design a graph to display the data that we collected during the class student scavenger hunt. Some students knew what to do right away and some struggled. This assignment carried two objectives, first, to introduce my students to Johnson’s Rules for Graphing, second, it allowed me to see how they would handle a problem like this. I will design a lesson or two about graphing using what I learn from seeing how my students graph. At the end of the week students received their “Welcome” sheet and their textbook. Time was spent learning about how to use the textbook and then completing the first textbook assignments. Students will need to have their books covered and the “Welcome” sheet signed by next Tuesday, September 13.

Next week I will be introducing my students to our digital classroom. I will be asking each student to show his or her parents how to move through our class wiki and this blog. I would ask that a parent not request to become a member of the wiki although you can view it at any time. Please feel free to follow my blog. I will use this to communicate to parents and students by posting at least one time per week. You are welcome to post constructive or encouraging comments or ideas at any time.

My class page is linked to the school website. To access my school webpage from the MMS website please click on “Teams,” then click on “Grade 7.” Next, find my name and click on the mouse in the right column. This will bring you to my school webpage. From there you can connect to this class blog and the class wiki. You can access this blog by clicking on the blue blog button on my school webpage and you can access the class wiki by clicking on the blue Link button and then choosing the first link.

Thanks for checking in to my class blog. I’m looking forward to an exciting year of science and discovery!