Today I've been working in the office. The schools are busy with conferences or vacations, and there aren't many people in the building at all here at the AEA either.
I spent the morning working in Teacher's Domain. Erica and Jeanne had both mentioned that I should get to know the site, so I put that on my list of tuhings to do, and finally got to it today. I went through all of the science resources and watched many videos, both to learn about things myself as well as to know what I could use them for and recommend them for. I was struck by how many resources there were on building bridges, and also delighted to see how many were on inventing. I gathered the links on a document so I can refer to them quickly.
My afternoon was spent working on the plans for the Braille school, as well as learning the EIE kit 'Catching the Wind' better (at the same time), Our theme will be 'Renewable Energy', and one day will be spent on wind energy. It occurred to me that these kids will have never 'seen' a windmill, so I called the windmill museum that I had visited in Indiana to see how much their windmill models cost, but they are closed. They should be open tomorrow, so I'll try again. Then I found a wind turbine model and e-mailed that info to Sara Larkin so she could order it if she so desired. Where we can show most kids pictures of these things, these kids won't have a clue what we're talking about, and it is rather silly to design something that you've got no experience with. I'm also working to convert the assessments to braille questions that they can respond to in their journals. Though we've done the windmill activity at the science expo, we didn't go through the EIE unit in the usual way, which I am learning about today.
