My Students

My students deserve the best education that we can provide. They currently only have textbooks to access the curriculum and funds are nonexistent for labs in a class that requires labs. They are ready and willing to learn through experimentation and projects pertinent to biology and earth science.

My students are all in Special Day Class and come from a disadvantaged background with a majority of them on free and reduced lunch.

They are disillusioned with school because they feel like it has nothing to offer them for life skills. Our school has recently gone wall to wall academies and we have lost our auto-shop, wood-shop and many of our art and music classes so there are little options for our students to choose what they want to learn. Therefore, we have to create opportunities in the core curriculum that are rich and rigorous to ensure that they feel like they get to be involved in their classes. They are always asking me to do labs and get microscopes for them so that they can see what it is that we are talking about. They are all quite capable to achieving success to one degree or another but we need help obtaining the materials that will enrich their educational experience.

My Project

The main way that my student will be using this material is by performing hands on experiments and using the visuals to assist them in understanding concepts that are difficult to envision for a student with a learning disability. The water quality lab will be used to test tap water from the school and their homes to help them determine the quality of their drinking water and to help them see how fortunate we are to have that water. The genome and meiosis labs will help them understand the biology standards relating to genetics, a very hard concept for SDC students to grasp. The microscope will help in the students understand the differences between animal and plant cells and allow them to see bacteria instead of just talking about them. We have no calculators with which to crunch the data that we will obtain through the labs.

Right now labs are more like activities that are done with paper and pencil/pen.

Giving my students the opportunity to actually do labs and analyze the results will help them to build the skills they will need such as analyzing and evaluating through reasoning and extended thinking. It is my goal to help my students work towards these goals so that they are more prepared for college and/or the work place. We've done some good work cleaning up the local wetlands, as is shown in the photo.