BREAKING NEWS!!! The tides may be changing!!

OK so today was possibly a mild break through to the naked eye but to me today was HUGE! On Monday in anticipation of no school on Tuesday I assigned homework for my animal science class which was simple, silly and easy. They were to draw out with small little pictures the directions to the lab we would carry out when we returned to school. So they came into class and began getting their packets out and waited for me and my magical stamp and then I came upon this awesomeness!!! Yes, I know I made it super large but you have to see this for its true beauty!! This girl used her time away from class to really get into these drawings and I LOVED it! I would be lying if I said this wasn't the highlight of my very very long day. We all have moments of doubt when it comes to our level of sanity and this profession and this my friends is a perfect example of that finally I am making progress with changing the tides of laziness with my students. So please help me find even more ways to help my student prepare for labs while enjoying learning at the same time. How do you prep students for labs? 

What a nerdy life I live...

So as I sit here on the oh so exciting Monday night I have actually made some pretty interesting things! I spent my Christmas money today at Staples getting random supplies the best and my absolute favorite.... SCENTED MARKERS!!

Now that I have admitted to being the biggest nerd ever on to the other nerdy things I did tonight, poster making. While at the store I purchased a flip chart (which happened to be the ONLY thing I went into Staples for but obviously that didn't go as planned). I have been seeing several ideas online for classroom posters that I have wanted for some time and so I present to you my super awesome and amazing new classroom posters.  

Ok get ready to stretch your neck out while checking out these first two (sorry some day I may become super computer savy and figure out how to turn these darn things once there are on the page)

This lovely poster I hope will help me to get my students back on track with their interactive notebooks. After staring at this on a picking it apart with my OCD brain I made a digital one that I have added to my TpT sight and you can find the link to that here What goes where?. 

This one I saw on another bloggers page and added a few things to each definition to better suit what I use with my students to remember these. 

This classroom management strategy is one I found on Pinterest and is very similar to one I am already using but I did not have a super cool poster so as you can guess I had to have a poster duh! 

This poster came to be through the ideas presented on several different posters on Pinterest. Most came from younger grade levels so this modification I hope will help my high school students understand how they can use the left side of their notebooks to showcase their notes in a visual way.

So now that it's nearly midnight I must put away these wonderful markers, wash my stained hands and go to bed. How do you see these being useful in your classroom? What could I have added/changed to make them even more awesome? Have an amazing New Year and thanks for reading!  

Interactive Notebook Addiction... Vocabulary

Those of you who follow me on Pinterest know that I LOVE to pin things to help me with school. I have found many many excellent ideas, projects, resources, fundraisers, and the list could go on for ever. It is almost unhealthy the amount of time I spend on Pinterest but one of the greatest things I have found has been all the resources on Interactive Notebooks. Some of the amazing blogs I follow are listed below and I could not encourage you enough to check out all the ways these teachers use these notebooks in their classrooms. Here is one of the ways I tie these notebooks into my classes. 

In this picture you see the inside of the vocabulary foldables I call a tri-fold 

This is the outside view of the tri-fold vocabulary foldables

 These tri-fold foldables I use with my CASE courses as well as all other courses I teach to help spice up the boring idea of vocabulary. I give the students the list of vocabulary words at the beginning of each section and they have one day of in class time to research and complete these. What they do not get completed is left up to them to complete on their own time. I check these vocabulary the day before we take the quiz over each section. This is just one of several examples I have and I will post more pictures of the vocabulary as I go along. The students in my classes are responsible for all the cutting, and gluing for all their own foldables and I find that ever with high school  students this helps to keep them much more engaged and involved in the lecture style activities. Although like most agriculture and CTE courses I do a tremendous amount of labs and hands on activities juicing up the necessary lectures has been a great addition to my curriculum. On my TpT page you will find all my foldables and resources. 

Follow these awesome teachers for even more help with implementing these notebooks in your room! There are more great things on my Pinterest board Fun for School! 
Caught in the Middle
Hands on Math in High School
The Science Penguin

So how do you use interactive notebooks? How do you see this working in your class?