My final day of my internship was AWESOME!!! I spent the entire day on Friday in the WPDC (Warehouse Product Development Center) Lab with many different people. The lab is where they test whatever the engineers are currently working on. On my last day they finally let me drive a forklift!!! That was definitely the highlight of my experience… even though I was terrified the entire time. I was also able to weld for the first time ever! It’s definitely much harder than it looks, but I was told I didn’t do that bad for my first time trying it out!
Now that I have completed my internship I am brainstorming the many different ways that I can bring my experiences back into my classroom curriculum. I’ve now decided that instead of doing just a couple of lessons, I’m going to do an entire unit plan with lessons placed at various times throughout the school year! By doing this I’m hoping that my students will constantly be able to make connections from math to future careers. Originally I had planned on focusing on proportional relationships, but now I plan to also come up with lessons for inequalities, unit rate, scale drawings, and possibly even angles. Throughout each lesson I will be bringing in experiences from my internship. I will also keep a focus on word problems (along with the GC corhort).
One thing I am SUPER excited about is the possibility of bringing my students back to the plant for a field trip. If funding is available then I will take my students back to the plant for a tour of the facility. They will also have the opportunity to sit through a Demand Flow Technology training that I designed with the Lego kits. I’m hoping everything works out so that we are able to go! 🙂 I know my students would love it!