Student Teaching Week 9

Teaching Agriculture in Belize!!

This week is my first week at Mopan Technical High School in Belize. It's pretty awesome.  In addition to warm weather, the students are fun to be around, the topics I'm teaching are awesome! and I love this environment.

I've included photos of some of my highlights with a short description of what I have accomplished this week.

We began working on our biodigestor project.  The first step was to drain the water.

The biodigestor as I found it

Draining the water and cleaning the pit

                                                      

                                                                          The pit once it was finished draining

Found this critter in our pit.  Had a lesson on turtles

                       There were lots of hands on learning opportunities with the students.                                                   

                  

Here we were testing the weight capacity of an egg

Observed aquatic species in the pond.

           

              Each student has a cilantro bed we planted.

                 I also witnessed & participated in school events                                                 

       

                         I played on the teacher's team for the Mopan Technical H.S. Basketball tournament. We won!

Teaching Reflection

This week I only taught for two days.  I was pretty excited to find that the lessons I prepared to teach here at Mopan Technical were the very subjects I taught I am teaching.  With that to say, my lesson preparation has come quite handy.

Overall I was pretty satisfied with my lessons.  I have successfully turned a couple lesson more inquiry based than I had originally planned.  It was exciting to see the challenge work. I can tell that my students like to be challenged to think but boy do they make it seem like a chore to provide that for them.  

If there is one thing that I would like to change in my instruction this week, I think it would be my introduction class that I had for my third form class.  I was not expecting there to be as many students in my class as there were.  So when I did my ice breaker activity to get to know everyone's names, it turned into almost my entire lesson.  I could have cut them off, but I could tell my students were loving the activity and would have been slightly upset if I didn't give everyone their turn.  So I sped it up by making people move faster but it still took up almost my whole class period.  I was able to finish my classroom expectations, procedures and consequences, but barely.  Next time, If I have a class this big, I will try an activity that consumes less time.  Like maybe a simple "Hi my name is Joe, and I come from Succotz" type of introduction around the room. 

On the plus, it gave me a better idea of how to estimate my time for activities in future lessons.

Looking into the future

Next week should be pretty exciting.  Friday is Open Day so Mopan Technical is opening the school to everyone in the community who is looking to find a place to send their students for high school.  Students in Belize have to apply to the school they want to go to.  So the decision to pick a high school is pretty big.  I will have the opportunity to participate in that.

In my classes, I will be teaching:

1st Form (Freshman) 

~ Soil Formation

~ Soil Types

2nd Form (sophomores)

~ Sexual reproduction

~ Flower structure

3rd Form (Juniors)

~ Sheep Breeds

~ Goat Breeds

 4th Form (seniors)  

~ egg structure

~ egg growth