September 26-30: Buckwheat Festival!

This past week, my students have been working with Prezi to create a presentation all about simple machines and their real life applications. This project was developed in anticipation of a field trip to the Buckwheat festival!

This past Friday I accompanied my students to the Buckwheat Festival in Kingwood, WV. What an experience that was! I had never been to this festival so I was really excited to be able to attend this year and finally get to try Buckwheat Cakes!

For this trip to be considered educational, each teacher had to create an assignment that involved students taking pictures while at Buckwheat. The 8th grade team planned an all-day picture scavenger hunt and put together a Buckwheat Packet that explained what the students needed to look for. For science, my mentor teacher and I came up with the idea to have students take pictures of the simple machines found in the carnival rides at the festival.

While at the Buckwheat festival, it was interesting to see the reaction of the students to various sites that would seem "normal" to me, but very foreign to my students. Some students had never seen a cow in "real life". Some had never seen cow poop in real life. Some had never even been to a festival of any kind in their lives. It was amazing to watch them have those "firsts" as we walked around to different exhibits and vendors.