Personal Goals: Sheila

This project will be beneficial to me in many ways. It will also allow me to pull on many aspects of my college education and truly be the capstone to my liberal arts education. From science to art to teaching to play, this project will engage me as much as the students we will be teaching!

The courses and experiences I will be pulling on to engage this project are spread through many disciplines, but will allow me to engage with students well. I've took many science courses, which will allow me to have a solid base for explaining concepts to the students. I have taken a dance course, titled Power Play which stresses the importance of play for all. By playing with the students I may enjoy myself, and teach even more effectively! Classes about our cultural and societal interactions with the natural world, like Nature and the American Landscape, have given me a good anthropological assessment of how we perceive the natural world. With this background knowledge I can address cultural misunderstandings or I can play on cultural assumptions, allowing them to guide our discussion. I have also been engaged in many teaching activities, from being a TA to summer work positions at schools to my student work job with the Northfield Reads and Counts program. With these experiences as my foundation, I hope to further develop my teaching skills.

Overall, I hope to engage my interdisciplinary knowledge to engage students, to further my skill development as a teacher, and, most importantly, to have fun!

Planning, Planning...

Over the past few days, we've been busy making lesson plans and working out the activities we'll be doing with the third graders over the semester. There are so many concepts and ideas that go into gardening, so we'll have our hands full even before the plants go into the ground! Below is our lesson and activity schedule for the semester:

March 16: Sampling fruits and vegetables, healthy eating games and matching activities, making healthy recipes with foods from the garden (planned by all)
March 30: Indoor planting for starter seedlings (planned by Kateri)
April 13: Biodiversity (planned by Kateri)
April 20: Why organic? (planned by Christina)
April 27: Tracing the food, local foods (planned by Sheila)
May 4: Field trip to a local organic farm (planned by Christina)
Week of May 11: Outdoor planting (planned by Sheila)
*After our lesson plans are complete, we'll be posting them online for others to view (and hopefully use!).

Last Friday, Christina and I went down to Greenvale Park Elementary to observe Sr. Seidl's class. It was useful for us to see how third graders learn and operate in a classroom setting as we plan out activities and learning goals for the upcoming weeks.
Kateri