Making Waves

This is my first ever blog round up day and I hope that you are all just as excited as I am. The NASA blog project for my NASA mentorship is off to a great start, even though there was a little trepidation from several parties at the beginning. There are five blogs so far, some with multiple posts, which is something I find very encouraging. We have, unfortunately, abandoned the #cscawesomescience tweets, though I will still be using it to post new blogs. So, without further ado, let me introduce you to our five students and their blogs.

One of the students is missing from this picture, but don’t worry. Her picture comes later.

Miss Willnerd’s blog was picked up yesterday by Kuato Studios and used in the online journal’s science section! It was her first ever blog post and someone put it in their journal. I was so excited that I had to stop the tsunami demonstrations to make the announcement because I couldn’t just let that go by unnoticed.

Sometimes science is hard.

Diane’s blog has a lovely reflection on science in elementary schools and why we might be seeing a decline in science interest with students. She also has some very funny memories of her first ever volcano, Mt. Wanahakalugi. Her blog also includes some wonderful reviews of children’s literature if you’re looking for a well rounded elementary teacher blog.

Diane and her partner, Kelsey and their rickety earthquake structure

Miss Adams’s is a first time blogger and she’s off to a great start! She’s already put up three posts and she just started on Monday. Once a blogger, forever a blogger. Her most recent blog post reads almost like a graphic novel as she’s posted so many pictures of the waves she created to destroy the little village she and Miss Willnerd had built.

Dani Buckley is also a first time blogger and she has created the perfect introductory blog post for this Nothing as Awesome as Science – Absolutely NASA project. She goes through everything we have done so far, from earthquakes to volcanoes to tsunamis. She has taken a more formal approach than her peers, so it’s a great place to get started if you don’t know anything about what we’re doing.

Steffie is our fifth blogger. She has several excellent pictures our different projects up on her blog that are a great way to see what the students are actually building. Steffie’s blog is an excellent example of pictures being worth a thousand words and personally, I think she should use her picture taking skills in her classroom because she’s so good at it. It would be a great way to record what her students were doing for administrators and parents.

Now that we’ve got the introductions out of the way, I can move on with some details. Every Thursday, we will have this blog round up where I will highlight the student’s most recent posts and give you my own synopsis and review of the week and the program. Each week it seems to get a little bit easier, a little bit more enjoyable. As a teacher, I couldn’t ask for a better place to see teaching methods in place. We, as mentors, want to back off the teaching. We want to flip the classroom, but we seem to struggle to get away from the board or to stop talking for a little while. We ask a question and the seconds tick by and time drags on and on and on into infinity and we finally give the answer even though it’s only been five seconds since we first spoke. It’s a place where I’m learning, maybe more than the students, about how to work collaboratively and how to cooperate with people I do not necessarily always agree with. I’m learning that it’s harder than I think to break out of the traditional teaching mode and it’s even harder to find that happy medium between instruction and scaffolding and student leading the class. Well, for however this turns out, I’m on board to the end… And I’m kind of excited.