End of Week10: Robots, Finishing “Documenting Your Journey” etc.

End of Week10: Robots, Finishing “Documenting Your Journey” etc. It should be a sign that I’m already two days into week 11 before I’ve been able to post this to my blog. Ack. So, except for the holidays and sick days that knocked the program off the “plan,” for week 10 I needed to diverge the different grade levels from

End of Week 7 Best Intentions/Best Laid Plans

End of Week 7 Best Intentions/Best Laid Plans Damn. I really wanted to be better about the week-to-week communication and posting of the ongoing STEAM Lab stuff. Oh well. Life. Just not cooperative. So, in week two I discovered that it was better to list my curriculum as “units” and not “weeks” because some units/lessons took several weeks to happen.

Year3-Week14: Thoughts from the Educational Trenches

I like being an educational grunt on the front lines in the classroom and take some pride that what others theorize about, I have to make happen. It might be a fool’s errand, but you can’t tell me what we’re supposed to be doing in the classroom if you’ve never spend any given week teaching in said classrooms. And it

Year3-Week12: The Value of Pressure in Learning

The original idea was to post at the end of every week something with much more reflection and thoughtfulness than my previous daily social media posts that I had done over the past two-years. I was able to keep to that schedule for the first eight-weeks or so, but have faltered and failed since then.

Year3-Week4 – It’s not like it’s rocket science, kind’a

2018-19 school year week 4. How do you turn left or right with robots that only have one motor connected to a single axle? Hmmm… I hadn’t thought that about that.

Year3-Week3 – Welcoming Our Robot Overlords

I’ve been wrestling with this problem since coming here in 2016: how to get robots into the hands of all of my students in the best way possible… And I was so excited that I didn’t take any photos/videos of the first class that began working on their LEGO WeDo robots (you know that’s excited!).

Year Three Week Two – The Plan’s First Trial

“No plan survives contact with the enemy,” Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, German Field Marshal I think I scared myself last week when posited the difficulty of teaching a single subject across six grade levels much less five subject areas across said six grade levels. Oops.

Year Three

Even though I’ve been running classrooms for 23-years, the challenge of beginning another school year is more than a little overwhelming. As if that weren’t enough, I also closed on my new condo on the first day of classes, so add moving and setting up a new home to the “beginning of the school year” challenges.