katie budrow

Tag: ngss

  • Creating a Culture

    Creating a Culture

    I often catch myself looking around my room and thinking, “This is awesome. This is exactly what it should be.” Granted, I don’t feel this way every day. There are definitely some rough patches and some whirlwind hours. The wonderful adolescents that I work with are bound to have a few not-so-wonderful days (both individually […]

  • The Struggle is Real

    My students are starting a project this week that I am incredibly excited about. It’s a physics project where they identify a real-world problem and design a solution to it. I’ve done if for the past for years, it is so unbelievably cool, and I cannot wait for them to get started.   Knowing this […]

  • Students Owning the Assessment Process Through Rubric Creation

    Ah, rubrics.  The favored tool for assessment by teachers.  Loved for their wonderful detail and their range of performance levels, rubrics are a great way to communicate expectations to students. Just like other teachers, I love a good rubric.  There’s just one problem … I’m really horrible at making them. I’m so horrible, in fact, that I’ve […]

  • Bringing Science to Life

    At the start of the year, I asked my students to define science.  Here are some of their responses … Cool, huh?  They have a lot of great ideas!  Many of those ideas center around hands-on activities, which is awesome and definitely a huge part of science (in the classroom or out of the classroom). […]

  • What It Felt Like to Have a Blank Grade Book

    It was ten days until the end of the quarter, and my grade book still did not have a single grade in it.   The grades were coming, so I was starting to breathe a little easier, but still … eight weeks in and not a single published grade.   At the start of the […]

  • Announcing the Launch of keepushealthy.dps109.org

    For the past several weeks, all ninety-three students in my sixth grade science classes have been working toward one common goal … to create their own website. Finally, it’s ready to be shown to the world!  I’m so pleased to announce the launch of … keepushealthy.dps109.org   Their purpose in creating the website was to […]