I’ve managed to procrastinate for another two whole days! I had set aside time every day this week to get a head start on getting ready for school. Most of the day yesterday and some of the day today I spent working on a video my superintendent asked me to make for a STEM Kickoff event we are having next week before school starts. A former US Senator and WA Governor, Dan Evans, is going to join us! My Sup wants us to share ways we are making our courses include more STEM. In my example, I show how I implemented robotics to make my 6th grade Science classes to include technology and computer science, engineering, and math.
This was a great way for me to avoid getting started on my back to school planning! I went back through the videos my students made last year and I screencasted them together into a video that turned out to be almost 15 minutes long! Yikes! After trimming it down to that supremely long just under 15 minute monstrosity using Screenflow 7 on my old iMac (which is slower than my PC) I decided to put it on Youtube anyway. You know, just in case someone wants to see all the great things my kids did last year (yeah, right!). It took hours to export and then it failed uploading to Youtube! I left it exporting overnight and then uploaded it to my Google Drive so I could download it to my PC and upload it to Youtube. I couldn’t get the video to show up on my Google Photos even though I moved it to the Google Photos folder so I couldn’t upload the video to Youtube directly from my Google Drive! While all of the above was going on I cut the heck out of the almost 15 minute video and got it down to just under five and a half minutes!
So I went from this: https://youtu.be/p-4dciAj-24
To this:
And instead of getting some planning done last night I was writing this post because I have SO MUCH TO DO AND I DON’T WANT to actually start! LoL Procrastination time!
The Marshmallow ChallengeI looked back at how I started the school year in 2016 and last year in 2017. This is my day one 6th grade Prezi (I made a similar one for my 8th graders last year and it needs to be updated more so than the 6th grade one). I often have my 6th graders do the Marshmallow Challenge before we go to Camp Cispus because it fits one of the activities they’ll be participating in at camp, the gorgeous outdoor low ropes challenge course. It’s amazing and all of us 6th grade teachers are trained facilitators so we get to take our own students on the challenge course every year. Last year I started the year off by having kids try out Classcraft and that took so much time, because the kids loved it so much, that I didn’t have time to do the marshmallow challenge before camp! So I jumped straight into an awesome observation vs inference activity to show how students how Scientists can be certain about things they can never see by having enough evidence. Here’s the activity that I use (only for the first two cubes on the pdf) that I got from my work with the North Cascades and Olympic Science Partnership (NCOSP). Then I have a welcome Pear Deck interactive slideshow that introduces kids to Pear Deck and to my course.
Marshmallow ChallengeSo if Classcraft takes as long as it did last year to get started the 6th graders may not get to the marshmallow challenge. Knowing that Classcraft took too long I could look for ways to get the marshmallow challenge in before the end of the first week (which is only four days long due to Labor Day – yeah, we have our new 6th graders for four days, then the following Monday we spend the day doing Cispus-related prep activities and Tuesday we take off for camp!!). For 6th grade I have plenty to do with kids for September and we need to get some time to debrief/learn about Mt Saint Helens because one of the Camp Cispus activities is a day trip to the volcano!
Observation vs Inference Cube ActivityMy 8th graders are a little trickier. I want to start with something hands-on and they did the marshmallow challenge with me when I had them in 6th grade. For them I’m thinking a breakout of some sort for day one because I need to introduce and get them going on their first project, which they will work on while I’m away at Cispus. Another activity I was thinking of doing on day one is this one I found on Mari Venturino’s blog for team building called Saving Sam.
For my 7/8 Robotics Computer Science course I have choices that would be easier and require less work if I didn’t have to be gone the entire second week of school. What I would have done on day 1, which now has to be moved to Monday of the 3rd week of school, is have them set up their Lego Mindstorms EV3 kits and make their first build. Once they get their first build done I can give them mini challenges like make your robot move to a line then turn and come back to where it started. Looking at the STEM Robotics 101 curriculum is a great place to start because not all of the kids in my class signed up for programming, much less programming with Java as this course will get to. So I have to win them over, the kids who signed up for robotics and the kids who signed up for engineering. So I will start with a few STEM Robotics 101 challenges before we get into learning how to program with EV3 robots with Java instead of using the block programming. So what to do the first two weeks, nine days, of school? I was looking at Code.Org and was thinking of having teams go through some of the middle school Computer Science Discoveries curriculum. I need to look through the lessons and see what kids can do with a sub.
And once I figure out what I will do I then have to create the quests for Classcraft for the 8th grade Science classes and for the Robotics Computer Science class! That’s the part that takes time on top of the time it already takes to plan things out for kids. I think it’s worth it or I wouldn’t be putting myself in this situation. Maybe I’ll get some work done today! Wishful thinking. 🙂
