Visiting with Halee

Today I was able to spend the day as an observer in the Ag room at Derry Area High School. Halee is doing a great job teaching a wide variety of classes from Introductory classes to Ag Construction.

She incorporated all aspects of a PSU lesson plan into each of her classes. She made sure to catch the attention of the students at the beginning of the class, after getting them started with bellwork relevant to the day's activities.

Furthermore, she eloquently checked for understanding with each student as they completed the days activities. In her first class, Halee, discussed with the students how animals perceive things like noise, light, depth perception, and humans in general. Afterward, the students completed lab that had them think about the way they perceive things versus what they actually are.

The Ag Construction class is working on a community project that they have a lot of autonomy in. They are creating wool displays with a group for the fair. These projects were completely designed by the students and are looking great. The students worked well with each other under close supervision of Ms. Wasson and Mr. Campbell.


Halee also had time to show me around their facilities, some of the projects they are working on, and experiments they are doing.

On a side note- we had some time to talk about some of our assignments for Penn State and catch up there. Also, we were able to compare some of our students' work and bounce ideas off of each other!

Also, found a fellow cohort member on the wall! 

Late Nights call for Sleepy Students

On Monday, I started my first day as a student teacher at Fort Cherry. My alarm went off at 4 AM and I made my way to meet the bus at McGuffey High School. Mrs. Hoover, Mr. Laesure and I got the students aboard. We then made our way to Fort Cherry to pick up the rest of the students and headed to Harrisburg. My first day of student teaching was here and I was more than ready!

The weather was not the best on Monday, and as we were leaving both Fort Cherry and McGuffey school districts had cancelled school for the day. We all talked about the situation and talked to people ahead of us on the road and they said that the roads were clear. The bus driver was confident, Mrs. Hoover and Mr. Laesure talked to their school administrators and we decided to keep going. The rest of the trip to Harrisburg was pretty uneventful. I am really glad I was able to see this scenario play  out and how to make these decisions.

We were able to make it to the Farmshow complex just after noon. Students were given explicit directions as to what needed to be done BEFORE they left the bus. I observed this often on the trip. We always gave students directions prior to them leaving the bus so that we had their attention and it was not chaos. We were then able to meet students in the large arena for the Mid-Winter Convention. Five students received their Keystone Degree this year and two students received a jacket from the PA FFA Alumni.

We took the students to Hoss's for dinner and then to the hotel to change. Then we took them to a local bowling alley for 2 hours. Mrs. Hoover's and Mrs. Cambruzzi's advice was simple: wear the students out! And to spend as little time as possible in the hotel.

The following day we took the kids to Hershey's Chocolate World where they were able to learn about proper chocolate tasting and some even were able to make their own chocolate candy bar! The trip home gave us ample time to discuss things that could be changed in the future. One of these would be to have a single drop-off/pick-up location instead of picking up at both schools to cut on travel time. Looking back, I can also acknowledge that there were no behavior issues on the trip and all of the teachers were well respected and had good rapport with their students. I hope that my trips with my ag program go this smoothly, even with weather hiccups!!