Winding Down

The nausea won't go away. It doesn't feel like a stomach virus anymore... everything I eat brings on waves of mild nausea. I've been meaning to go see the doctor. Tomorrow I'm going in for some routine follow-up blood work. Perhaps the doctor can fit me in then.

There is an awards program at school in the morning... I should be able to get back in time for it if I'm only getting the blood work done. Right now, I'm more interested in feeling better than watching kids get their awards. Normally, I'm all into the awards program, which we have every 9 weeks or so, but I haven't felt 100% since Saturday when the stomach thing hit me suddenly.

Could be a response to the end of the year? I'm winding down fast. But I feel like I'm getting everything done that needs to get done. And the kids are hanging in there, which is hard because testing is over and some have the attitude that there's no point to school if there are no more tests.

I got an idea from a Project Wild workshop for teachers two weeks ago. I enjoyed searching for bugs around the campus, and thought the students would too.

One reading activity I will fit in involves a brief study of common insects. We'll browse through some insect books I checked out of the library, and talk about what kinds of insects they expect to find around our school and why they are valuable to the environment.

Then I'm givng each of them a bug collector. That's a plastic container with a special viewing lid, vented, with tweezers and magnifying "glass". I bought them for a $1 each at the dollar store.

The students know how much I love to study bugs, and they like my bug collector containers that I keep in the classroom to temporarily house insects we find in the building throughout the year (we always release them after we look them up in the insect book).

After we go outside and collect a bug or two for them to study, we'll identify them, ask questions, talk about where we found them, what they saw as they looked. They'll write a description of the bug, where they found it, and what it was doing when they found it.

We'll let the bugs go, and the kids will keep the bug collectors. I want them to take them home and find bugs in their own yards to study. In this way I hope to encourage a healthy respect for insects, and instill a new response when they see one, to replace their usual response (that is, to step on them without asking any questions).

This will be an interesting activity that would incorporate reading, science, and writing. Something I don't do often enough since I am an EC teacher and my focus is generally reading, writing, and math. But that is going to change.

After all, this is a year of transformation for me!