NAAE take aways

 

Day 1: FAST

 

Day one I met multiple pre-service teachers, students that are going through the same thing as I am. I met people from Kentucky, Missouri, Louisiana and Mississippi. Each had a different reason why they wanted to come to NAAE since it wasn’t required for them to come like use. Most said that it was an opportunity for professional development to attend the workshops and sessions that were offered. Others said for networking with Inservice teachers to gain knowledge, experience, and resources from them. 

It was great to meet others that are going through the same thing as I am right now and hear about their program and their experiences in the classroom so far. 

 

Day 2: Workshops

 

            Over the next couple of days, we attended various workshops that were put on. One of my favorites was the photosynthesis inquiry-based learning. I met an ag teacher from Idaho, that gave me great activities to add into my classroom. One of the activites was teaching the color wheel for floral design by getting sugar cookies and white frosting with the primary colors of dye and having the student frost the cookies. So one cookie would be the primary colors, then they would have to mix up more frosting to get the secondary colors and frost a different cookie and so on. This is an activity that I would have never thought of and he said he has gotten a lot of success with students understanding the color wheel and how that relates to floral design. 

 

Day 4: PAAE meeting 

 

During our regional meeting I got to meet a bunch of different PA agricultural teachers and afterwards I got to eat lunch with them in the food court. One of the teachers from PA I talked to was Darla, she offered a lot of advice about student teaching and what she’s had her student teachers do in the past. She was also on one of our teacher questions panels and we got to hear a lot about her experiences with teaching and how she dealt with different situations. It was very insightful to get to talk to different teachers and learn about their experiences and advice.