The Apt Ag Teacher

Getting this thing set up is a project- because of school security issues and not necessarily the machine itself.

Excited to have this for use by our chapter and district though!

A new offering I get to teach this year is a Rural and Community Event Planning Course. Students are deep diving into the ins and outs of planning different level of events, getting hands on experience, and hearing from guest speakers about careers that involve having to plan events- not just the ones you normally think.

A few weeks ago, the students heard from Lori Williams who is the Executive Director. She talked about the history of the organization, the types of events that get put on throughout the year that supports the livestock show, and also some of her other work that has involved different types of event planning. She challenged them to design a new Photo Booth for their benefit auction.

Today, the students got to go in and help with the big day of set up for the auction tomorrow and got to put their skills to work by putting together the Photo Booth. A labor of love that they did such a good job with!

I’m very excited to see what this class has in store for them. And even more exciting, this class is also a college in the high school course and students get Comm Studies credits for completing the course!

When you can teach middle schoolers a new game, still be reviewing content, all while they’re highly engaged-I think that’s a sign of a success!

We’ve been learning about animal body systems in middle school animal science, and they’ll be taking an assessment on it tomorrow, so today we played Spoons!

Not many middle schoolers nowadays have had the joy of a cutthroat game of Spoons. Some explanation and practice rounds were required to get the hang of it being fast-paced and also trying to be sneaky when taking a spoon.

They still had four card and they had to find a description, list of some of the major organs, a picture of the system, and the name of the system. Once they had all four of those, then they could go for their spoon.

It was a fun way to get their brains moving and not using a tech device while doing it. Excited to see if it pays off for them!

Twin Day at school with our Chapter President in our awesome Tech Shirts!

Our first arrangement sale in Floral!
I’ve put off doing it, because of my own stress of putting something like this together. I wish I would have done it sooner. I learned a lot this first go around, but I think it’ll definitely be worth doing in the future with the class. We’re only a semester long class this year, so we plan to do one in January and hopefully my event planning class we can do some for other months of the year.
If you’ve hesitated, just do it- start with something small or simple.

Recipe:
-3 Peppermint Carns
-3 Red Mini Carns
-2 white Spray Roses
-2 Daisy Mum
-2 Leatherleaf
-1 to 2 Tinted Salidago
-1 to 2 Assorted Christmas Greenery

It’s been a week- a tiring and crazy week but a week I wouldn’t trade for anything. Their hard work aver the last few months was tested and they put it all out there. had a stellar week at convention this year and LR did as well. I am a proud advisor today as we head home and get ready for a couple more State contests before a few weeks of some rest.

I got ALL the compliments about my skirt today at school! So cute!!

It was a busy weekend- got to see some of my favs show at the Palouse Classic Jackpot and then some time with some of the best Ag Teachers at the WA-ACTE Conference getting new ag teachers set up with mentors. Summer is coming to a close FAST!

Ag Teacher’s Conference is one of my favorite weeks of the years. Some of the best teachers and people come together for 5 days to learn, grow, reflect, and move our profession forward. We put on and attend workshops, we participate in industry tours, we work together to offer the best opportunities for our fellow teachers, as well as for the agriculture education students across the state. Sometimes we may find ourselves thoroughly exhausted at the end of a school year- and this helps us fill our cups so we can be the best teachers that we can be for our students.

This year I had the opportunity of putting on the first teacher resiliency pre-conference workshop for teachers who have been teaching 15 years or more. Being able to support and help teachers rekindle or stoke their passion for ag education is something I truly enjoyed. I also got to present two workshops about awesome opportunities for middle school students in Washington Ag Edication. And I got to be in charge of another amazing intern group. Working with the interns reminds me of the great young adults that we have that will be taking on their own classroom someday soon.
I never get as many pictures as I hope, but a snippet for the memories will do!