This past year was felt like my first year because our master schedule changed and students now had two electives in their schedule instead of just one. This meant my classes were no longer quarterly but they were semester long. I had been fighting for this change for years. To be honest, I regretted it on the teacher side of things. My classes went from average of 10-15 to 19-30. I also started having mixed grade level classes. Which on paper seems fine but in PowerSchool I had to take attendance twice and grading was divided by grade level. It was really annoying how much extra work it all was.
So when I started looking at how I wanted to organize my 6th grade classes now that they were semester long, I decided I wanted to replicated something I had heard in a session at ACTE Visions. I wanted to spend each week learning about each career cluster and then have them do a hands on project in the middle of the week that connected to that career cluster. We’d start Mon and Tues learning about the cluster, Weds and Thurs doing that hands on activity thingy, and Fridays do a research on a specific career. I was hoping that by doing this, students would get to learn about so many more jobs. So I set out to find resources that I could put together to create an interactive notebook for each week.
The first one that I started with was Construction and Architecture week. See the video below from my Tik Tok! I regretted later making this my first project since they were still very young and green 6th graders and I was handing them utility knives!
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8rMM46U/
The files used on Mondays for notes are notes that I created. I figure I’ll eventually put them on TPT to sell or for free but ehhh it’s too much work. I created them on a Google Slideshow that is formatted for 8.5 x 11 so that they can be printed as a packet as well as for the notebooks. I would print the pages for the week stapled in the corner and they would glue them in on Mondays.
This. took. for. ever!
By 2nd semester, I was printing off the packets or the whole quarter and not using the composition notebooks.
My district policy is that we must enter two grades per week. The first grade is 25 points for their bellwork answers. Each day I post the question of the day and they have to answer it in the chart for the current week in their book. The 2nd grade comes from the career matching worksheets shared above for Fridays.