I can’t believe that it has been a month since my internship at the museum ended. I had all these goals for blogging and posting pictures and planning…and then life happened. I returned home to my 2 year old son who wants all of mommy’s attention. I also returned to a leadership role at my school which has caused me to start getting ready for the school year early. I am also the president of the Reading Association in my county which brings more responsibilities. With all of that being said, I am going to attempt to get caught up on my blogging. 🙂
Working in the paleo lab had its perks. We were surrounded by dinosaur bones and all types of equipment. The one perk that we didn’t have was that there wasn’t a project already created working with dinosaur bones to follow to create our product. The other teams had lessons that they could look at, tweak, or get ideas from. We had nothing. We racked our brains for days just trying to figure out how in the world we were going to incorporate this project into our classrooms. There was no camera to set, dinosaur bones are not just laying around in our school yards, and the programs that the scientist used were so high tech and not user friendly that there were many days I walked back to my hotel room ready to give up! We talked through many ideas until one day we just came to the understanding that our project was going to be different from most projects…and that was okay!!! We took the ideas that Jason shared and thought about how it related to things that we were already doing in the classroom. For example, we played around with a program called ImageJ where we were placing “landmarks” on different points on the dinosaur skull. This is the same thing as marking ordered pairs on a coordinate plane. We were comparing the lengths of the dinosaurs snouts which is the same as comparing and contrasting two objects in any class. Once we started looking at it this way, the ideas just started rolling in! I am super excited about teaching this lesson to my students.
Until next time…which will probably be tomorrow because I’m playing catch up. 🙂