First day in my Cooperating Center... as a teacher!

Life Knowledge lessons are kind of fun and pretty easy to understand, but they won't be taught for the 6 weeks I will be the "teacher" at Wellsboro in the Spring :)
However, they did open my eyes to the field of resources for Ag Ed lesson plans! Don't forget the extensive list!**

So after 3 days of teaching at Central Mountain, I was able to sleep semi-well before driving into the great northern tier of PA for a couple of hours at Wellsboro Area High School.
Let me just first brag about my ag program... I love my kids already. They have a twitter handle (@wellsboroag) and my teacher is a CASE certified, national agriscience ambassador. They have some pretty cool resources (rabbit room, 3 greenhouses, forest lab, etc.) for being such a small program... and Wellsboro Ag Ed boasts about 20% of the school population. I think my high school ag program population was maybe 3% of the school population?
Anyways, with this already in mind, and knowing some of my students already, I was already excited to not have to walk into a completely new room and teach to a class of 30 crazy students (max 24 in my Wellsboro classes).
The LifeKnowledge lesson I chose was about being involved in all levels of the community. This was an especially exciting topic, as I got to listen to some of my students discuss the need to do more community service projects after a particularly enthralling National FFA Convention Session. It was so cool to be there, next to my cooperating teacher, as they started brainstorming in the van ride on the way back to the hotel :) One of those "I'm excited to teach" moments.

Anyways, back to the lab that I am supposed to be blogging on.
So I was able to do this lesson 2 times, mainly because the Ag Sci 1 and FFA/Leadership classes are back to back, and why not teach an extra class period? It was a cool concept, to be able to repeat a lesson, as it is something I will do in the spring with 2 sections of An Sc 2. I think it helps us, too, get into the reflective mindset of "okay, how did that go? did it go as I planned? what can be improved? did they gain something?" for ALL classes (not just repeats).
I really didn't have the same management problems with my students at Wellsboro as I did at Central Mountain. There were times in this particularly engaging lesson where students were unresponsive. Then again, they had probably never been asked to think about how to be engaged at the global community level before... so it was quite new to some of them. And even forcing them to think about local community engagement was good - I saw some sparks flying and was encouraged at their interest in thinking of ideas even if they didn't come up with a lot of unique ones.

I definitely enjoyed the opportunity to break them into groups to work, then present. I wish I had more time, though! Only 42 minutes per period at Wellsboro, and Mrs. Berndtson had to make a couple of announcements - so this was a good test to how I adapt an hour-long LP to a much shorter time period. There may have been some reason to cutting out one of the activities to allow for more group work/brainstorming, but I just liked the iceberg example so much, I had to keep it.

There were like 4 or 5 students who had BOTH classes (one after the other) so I had to come up with something for them to do the second period rather than participating in the same activity again. So, I had them expand upon one of the local community service ideas by making an "advertisement for community service" poster to hang in the school. It turned out to be for Operation Christmas Child, one of the activities that the FFA chapter decided to take on after convention. While the packing date was already over, the students worked together to color a poster for promotion of this opportunity - they can use it next year! I should have had something a bit more engaging for them to do, but the depth of this Life Knowledge lesson wasn't too challenging that there were a lot of extended activities.

Overall, it was a great time to get to know some of my students for the spring and talk to my cooperating teacher some more. I also got to talk to one girl about her mice SAE project and some others about them helping with the rabbits. All in all, this was a great chance to get into our classroom, practice using management techniques there, and begin building rapport. I am super excited for the spring!! I know it is going to fly by!

Mrs. Berndtson, my cooperating teacher. The students say we look like sisters... what do you think? 

**My current list of resources for lessons, powerpoints, info, etc (currently on a sticky note on my computer desktop):

Resources:

1. Glen Rose FFA http://www.glenrosearkansasffa.com/lesson%20plans.htm

2. GA Ag Ed http://www.gaaged.org/Browseable_Folders/Curriculum/Lesson%20Plans/

3. CA Ag Ed http://www.calaged.org/resources/curriculum

4. NAAE CoP

5. CTEonline.org 

6. Craig Kohn , Wisconsin http://wuhsag.weebly.com/

7. Idaho http://www.uidaho.edu/cals/ae4hyd/secondaryagcurriculum

8. FFA Learn https://www.ffa.org/FFAResources/ffalearn/Pages/default.aspx