For the first time ever, I got to teach a class during a summer school session today. It sounds kind of crazy but I have always wanted to teach summer school. For many years, I asked. For many years, nothing came of it. But, being at a different school this year, in a different district,…
For over ten years – almost the entire duration of time I led the Evergreen Garden Club at one of our district’s four elementary schools, I wanted to be involved in providing an enriching summer school experience on Monarchs or other seasonal horticultural topics. After all, our growing season in Wisconsin is short and what…
For the last two weeks, I’ve been making regular trips to the school gardens I now manage. They are vast and I am not yet done cleaning up the plants, now dead, left to serve as winter interest and perhaps some sources of food for the birds. I am about two thirds of the way…
This year my boys were involved in some unusual learning projects in high school. My soon to graduate senior took a business course called Building Wealth that was more of a course about belief and value systems than the accumulation of physical wealth. It was a wonderful experience for him. In that course, they had…
Have you ever heard of National History Day (NHD)? Let me tell you about my past experience with it as I reference my three sons. Then, I will elaborate on the experience I had with it today at our regional competition. One Website – that progressed from school to regionals and on to the…
Some years ago, before we expanded and built a fourth elementary school in our district, our students had art on a cart. Since there were so many students and only one art room, part-time art teachers visited classrooms for the time the students were scheduled to have art class, which I believe was once in…
Last month I prepared my first Kahoot for a presentation on Carnivorous plants. As a newly hired garden club advisor for a near-by school district, I agreed to do a limited amount of in-classroom presentations for teachers on topics related to the environment and/or gardening. So as not to create a great deal of extra…
Just over a year ago, my husband bought a 3D printer for our house. Really, it was bought for my 18-year-old who will graduate from HS in a few months. He’s our inventor, our experimenter, our dreamer. Over the course of the last year, he’s put the 3D printer to good use. He played with…
Deb Frasier, one of the authors on the TwoWritingTeachers.org Blog wrote this week about writing environments. She dove into how and where she decides to write and then wrote about student writing spaces. Her points about having spaces comfortable and conducive to writing struck a chord with me for a few reasons. Firstly, I encounter…
In October, I accepted a position as a Garden Club Advisor for an internationally themed elementary school in our area. It is a well-known, well-respected school of choice, locally. I do not want to say I was a shoe-in for the position, but I interviewed offering 13 years of experience of leading a garden club…