More Posts
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Using Color to Organize the Secondary Classroom
As a secondary classroom teacher, have you ever seen all the wonderfully colorful primary classrooms on pinterest and feel a little jealous? In my years of teaching, I have yet to have a room to really call my own. I’ve always had to share and I’ve always been the non-senior person sharing that room. In […]
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Weekly Lab Setup Tips for New Science Teachers
I know as a new teacher there is a lot to take in. Class schedules (rotating!), a teacher planner, 100+ names and faces to memorize, bulletin boards to set up, class routines to decide on, and more. But a new SCIENCE teacher?! If you’re a new science teacher, you’ve got to figure out a whole […]
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How to Survive the End of the Year: A Science Teacher’s Guide
You survived the onslaught of spring standardized tests. Barely, after losing a few brain cells literally staring at struggling or bored students for hours on end. (I swear proctoring is worse than actually taking an exam.) If you teach seniors, you survived the getting-into-college weeks and even the College Decision Deadline. Spring break is […]
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Differentiation in the Science Classroom #3: Alternate Assessments
In my last Differentiation in the Science Classroom post, I wrote about lab reports. And now I’m going to write a post about NOT writing lab reports. (Crazy, I know, but bear with me…) Having students write a full lab report every time I did a lab would have pretty much burned me and my […]
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Differentiation in the Science Classroom #2: Lab Report Writing
Helping all students with writing in the science classroom can be really difficult. A lot of science teachers give up trying to teach writing, because they feel the pressure to get all of the science content crammed into the year. Lab reports take an eternity to grade. And bad lab reports take longer than an […]
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Differentiation in the Science Classroom #1: In the Lab
Helping all students, including students with special needs and English language learners, in high school science classroom is a challenge. In this blog series, I will focus on a few different techniques that teachers can use to help each and every student in their class succeed. Some of these techniques can also help other students […]
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Mentoring Science Fair Students and Keeping My Sanity at the same time
In my years of teaching, I have helped to mentor many students for the science fair. At my school, my job was to help students get the paperwork ready for the local and regional fairs. I also helped students who needed a little guidance to design their own experiments and in some cases perform their […]
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Best classroom management tip ever!
I learned this tip from my alternate route night school teacher, Captain David Wick. He is a real captain who sails boats on the weekends. And I cannot tell you how much it has helped my classroom function. It truly has helped more than anything else I learned in night school when I was going […]