Teaching 6th Grade Science

Well hello everyone,

Long time no hear. Having a blog is not something I'm the greatest at, lol. Well it hasn't been a full year since my last blog, so that's good. This school year has been intense and busy. I'm at a different school this year, hopefully, I won't have to move to a different school next year. I plan on staying with 6th grade and the team that I have. It's so much work to move to a different school. I've been moved to different schools a lot without being asked, only 1 move in the past 10 years in education has been my choice. This year I'm trying to make another choice and stay with 6th grade.

Teaching 6th grade is TOUGH and definitely not for the faint of heart, but it's also been very rewarding. It's allowing me to be more reflective on how I am as a teacher and the areas that I need to grow in. It's also been WAY less of a headache to teach one subject. I feel like Elementary education isn't integrated enough in order for proper teaching to be done. There's too many pacing guides and different curriculum to keep up with and goodness if you fall behind on pacing, you have to drop a subject of 2 for the day and it's usually Science first then Social Studies. Dropping those suck because Science is a tested subject by the state and there's all kinds of loss in knowledge created by the time they get to 6th grade. It's been stressful for me to have to go back and do so much teaching to give them prior knowledge before be can truly start almost any lesson I teach. We won't even talk about the way most of these babies can't even write on grade level or write at all and the fact that Science actually has a lot of writing in it. It's crazy.

BUT the rewards of teaching 6th grade are great! When these babies actually get it, they shout to the sky with pride. It's like they are finally being seen and they want everyone to know. They definitely love attention at this age. I'm not made at it though because I get it because I remember that me at that age. However, I do appreciate the fact that most of the time, these babies seek out the positive attention. Yes, we still have a good amount of them seeking out any attention, including the negative attention, but they primarily want some to tell them good job when they are doing a good job and that you see them. The one thing that I was absolutely not prepared for while teaching 6th grade is that they STILL want to eat things that are for the class experiments....WHY? They want to eat things that aren't even supposed to be eaten! Lol, it's crazy!

I do also love that I can actually have an after school program! Other than Girls On The Run, which is great don't get me wrong. I host a STEM Club and that's been amazing for my growth as a STEM educator (I need more growth, lol) but it's also been fun to have all these different projects to do. The kiddos eat it up and we do have a lot of fun, although mediating the language choice is not fun, but that's not fun during the regular school day either. We have covered a lot in a short amount of time. Novel Engineering, Legos, making potato chips and ice cream for black history month, building a playground (on paper and 3D models and Duplo legos), & more. It's been very rewarding.

All in all, I think I'll stay in 6th grade, it's a hard grade that a lot of people surprisingly don't want to teach or think they want to teach. It kind of reminds me of teachers I've worked with in the past who thought they want to teach Pre-k or Elementary school and then was like, nope, I was wrong, this is not what I thought it was. They dip because altogether teaching wasn't really for them, or they switch school districts because as we see, some areas that people teach in, you will he tested to see if you truly love teaching or if you just need a change of scenery. 

What's your school year been like this year?

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