Sub Plans

My son attends school in a different district than where I teach. Unfortunately this means his schedule sometimes does not match mine. Yesterday, despite reaching out to every sitter I could think of, I had to take a personal day to stay home with him on his day off. Wait . . . maybe that was a fortunately as I rarely get one-on-one time with him and he loves it!

Back to the point of the post. As I was preparing for my absence, I wrote my typical, work intensive sub plans. One class is working on projects so they received project work time, but the others all had to do problems out of the book. These are the easiest plans to write because they are in-line with the content of the time, not dependent on my guidance or “expertise” and keep the kids focused on the content. Am I happy with this? No!

This morning as I was thinking of what to post about, I remembered “Data Nuggets.” I have used these before, have a set as my emergency sub plans, have used them with subs, and completely overlooked them for yesterday! Ugh! Let me try to redeem myself by encouraging you to take a look at Data Nuggets. If you click on “For Educators” you will see a nice explanation of how the data nuggets are organized and ranked. These are lessons about a particular science research study that have students analyzing data, identifying the researchers’ hypotheses, and then drawing conclusions. Depending on the level of the nugget, students either use a graph to analyze or create a graph from the data given. The spectrum of data nuggets is vast and covers many topics in science. Here is a link to the searchable data nuggets: Current Data Nuggets

Finding lessons on the internet has its pros and cons. One of my hesitations in assigning work I found on the big ol’ web is the access students have to simply finding and copying the answers. Data Nuggets, thought of that, too! In order to get the teacher guides, you have to email them and they verify you are a teacher. I love that! Plus, the content is engaging enough I don’t think students are as tempted to just find an answer and copy it. They get into the research, piquing their curiosity.

Try it out and let me know what you think!