Monday, May 18, 2009

Keeping Focus at Year's End

Here in the states we are preparing for summer break at the end of May. With only one week left for us here in Missouri, there is a big problem that presents itself this time of the year. How do you keep students focused and on task this late in the school year? At this point in the year standardize testing is over, students are tired, teachers are making vacation plans, and lessons tend to become less meaningful. So the question becomes, how do you give the students motivation to be accountable in a month that can easily become meaningless?

Larry Ferlazzo is a high school teacher from Sacramento, CA. In a recent blog post Larry set out to find a solution for this problem. In this excellent post you can read about very helpful tips to keep students and teachers focused until the final bell rings. You can check out his great read by clicking here.

Mr. McClung

2 comments:

My Teacher Hat said...

My 7th grade physical science class does an Amusement Park Physics unit at the end of the year. Each group of four students builds a model amusement park ride - roller coaster, freefall, bungee jump, the twirly swing ride, or the pirate ship. We learn about energy transformations, circular motion, and Newton's Laws. And on the last day of school, we go to a small amusement park a 45 minute drive from here.

My 10th grade engineering class just finished building Rube Goldberg machines. We still have over a month of school here in New England, so we are just about to start a short unit on binary code. During our last month, we build a robot (from a kit) and use binary to program it. This is the first year I've taught engineering, and I'm really looking forward to this project!

John Hadley Strange said...

Thanks for the link! Good ideas.