Luke's Blog

https://www.edutopia.org/article/making-most-class-book-clubs For this week, I decided to do some further research on the idea of having book clubs in your own classroom. This article is from edutopia by Beth Pandolpho, a high school English teacher, where she gives her own perspective on book clubs in her classroom and what it takes for them to be successful.  She has found that independent reading and student choice are significant factors in helping students improve as readers. She provides her students with meaningful book options to read and engaging activities that might spark discussions. I believe that it would be important to provide students with interesting books that they could choose from, while also letting them interact in discussions. Also, I believe that it is important to emphasize that reading is important for all subjects, not just ELA. I would be interested to see how a book club would work in a social studies, science, or math class at the middle school leve...

This video helped me understand the importance of differentiating instruction for all students in a content-area classroom. Not every student learns at the same rate, so it is important to differentiate the way that I introduce content and ask them questions about the introduced content. In the video, Ms. Maronpot used different differentiation strategies to reach all of her students. She was also given many new ideas from Dr. Royce that she was able to utilize in her classroom. I enjoyed seeing Ms. Maronpot using traditional, hands-on, and visual activities that each student could connect to depending on how they best learn. Also, I liked the idea that Dr. Royce brought up about trying to challenge students to apply what they already know opposed to simply asking students questions based on common knowledge. Application questions allow students to think more deeply about certain concepts that were introduced to them. For example, trying to get students to give examples of certain situ...

https://www.teachengineering.org/activities/view/duk_rollercoaster_music_act For this week, I decided to do research on possible IPM activities that students could engage with and learn from. The activity I found is about creating roller coasters using pipe insulation and marbles. When I was in 8th grade physical science, my class did a similar project where we created our own roller coasters in groups. Creating roller coasters would be a great idea for a physical science class because the activity deals directly with key vocabulary, such as potential and kinetic energy, gravity, friction, and acceleration. Also, creating roller coasters would be a real life application to several challenges that engineers might face when constructing roller coasters. To further enhance the project to reach more content areas, it might be beneficial for students to construct several roller coasters in a created amusement park, and pick out a location and budget the cost for admission on a computer. ...