TEST WEEK.
Since my school does semesters, we have our end of course state tests this week. For teachers, this means that our planning time goes out the window because they need all hands on deck to administer or proctor tests.
May the odds be ever in our favor.
After that, we have some teacher work days, and then.... SECOND SEMESTER. Ugh. Not ready. I get a whole new group starting on the Thursday after MLK day.
One thing I do to keep myself from getting bored or losing my marbles is try out new ideas. I always have a whole bunch of ideas saved on Pinterest and other places. Last week, in preparation for the new semester, I was searching for ideas and found this:
http://www.teachingthecore.com/article-of-the-week-assignment/
This is a blog about one teacher's use of Kelly Gallagher's "article a week" idea. I really like this idea, especially for science. Students have a lot of exposure to literature and historical texts (at least, I assume they do) but very few science teachers have their students read informational science texts.
I can't say that I blame those teachers. After all, it is incredibly difficult to find good science literature that is on the reading level of our students. Everything seems to be elementary or university. There is no "10th grader" reading set for science. If there is, I haven't found it yet.
My plan is to try regular articles online. There are many websites that offer articles for current science topics:
- http://www.livescience.com/
- https://www.sciencenews.org/
- https://student.societyforscience.org/sciencenews-students
And those are just on the first page of Google!
Here is my plan to implement this into my classes. I am looking for a way to "jazz up" my bell ringers. Right now they are just bland questions and students have no engagement in them. I will do "article of the week" Friday. The student's homework on Thursday will be to read the article and respond according to Gallagher's form. (See the first link for an example of that.) Then on Friday, we will discuss the article at the beginning of the class.
I will keep you updated on how it goes!
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