Plan, Re-Plan, and then Plan Again

 Week 3 is now in the books, and it has kept on the trend that no week has been "normal" since I have started student teaching. This week marked the start of semester 2/quarter 3 and the beginning of my Fish and Wildlife class and it started off with a virtual day both Monday and Tuesday because of the snowstorm that hit us. On these days we only have 20 minutes for instruction and having these at the start of the quarter with a brand new class made for an interesting kick off to a class. A lot of what I had planned for this class now has to be rearranged because of having that time taken away on Monday and Tuesday. In addition, on Thursday of this week we went back to the quarter 2 day that we missed last week because of snow, leaving me with one day in person this week with my new Fish and Wildlife class, and even then I only saw half of the group because of hybrid learning.

Have I mentioned how much I'm learning about adaptability and making do with the situation?

Despite having a lot of stuff throwing off the typical schedule of the week, I have been able to get a lot done with planning. I've worked out some issues with a few of my units assessments, planned out the Speeches unit for FFA Leadership as well as did some work on the area competition logistics, found some fun and engaging activities on wildlife, and planned out some community service projects for the FFA chapter to do.

I have also worked on two projects this week that I am very excited to implement with my students: a lab on white nose syndrome and a virtual visit with Elk Country Visitor Center.

The lab on white nose syndrome is something I've had in the works for the past week and am collaborating with a fellow ag teacher on. It will be for my Fish and Wildlife class and demonstrate how deadly invasive species can be. Through having the students play the role of little brown bats in PA and working through real scenarios, they'll discover what white nose syndrome is and how it has caused the decline of these bats. 

The other event I have in the works is a virtual visit from Elk Country Visitor Center. They do a program where they live stream into the classroom to educate about everything elk. To accompany this, they send an "elk trunk" to the school which contains an elk pelt, antlers, jaw, and so much more (they also send extra lesson plans and activities for me to use!) That visit is scheduled for the end of March, and I have even been chatting with my cooperating teachers about doing another visit with them and opening this extra visit up to the FFA chapter and other groups in the school. 

My favorite part of the week, however, was playing the shop. As part of my professional development, my cooperating teachers and I are taking a little bit of time every Friday to work on some ag mechanics skills. This week we focused on stick welding and I got to spend about 2 hours learning about how to manage a shop, methods of teaching welding, and even got to see some examples of cool project the students at Big Spring do during their welding class (examples are pictured on the right). 

I even got to see a foot shear which is used for cutting sheet metal! Pictured down below is this machine in action and it takes some force to stomp down on that pedal. I even found myself needing to jump a little to get it to cut through the metal!