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Hey everyone, its Education Station, the show where we invite teachers from all across West Virginia to submit videos of themselves teaching their favorite lessons.

In today's episode, we've got three exciting lessons about writing, science, and at home expectations.

Well, hello, and welcome back everyone.

I'm your host, Alex Melanie's, and we're kicking off today's episode with a fun lesson from Miss Jones.

And Miss Hayes.

They're going to teach us about a special type of writing called opinion writing.

Let's check it out.

Hi, I'm Amy Jones.

And this is Vanessa Hayes.

Today we're going to do a lesson on opinion writing.

And with opinion writing, we have a debate and the debate is whether plastics should be banned or not.

Okay, so I have these articles that we already read through and we listed pros and cons to using plastic bags based on these articles, which are our sources.

Okay, so now that we have listed our pros and cons to this, we really should be able to form our own opinion.

So with that being said, we're going to form our own opinion.

And we are going to then write an essay.

But first we have let's let's first say I'm a believer, and I can statements.

So I want to hear you guys say, I'll say it You said Are you ready?

Right?

All right, I can I can write and write an opinion essay, an opinion essay.

Okay, so the common language for writing an opinion essay is that you have to first make a plan.

And then after your plan, you can write it, revise it, edit it and publish it.

So are you ready to plan it right, and I'm gonna go through the steps on how you plan.

So when you make a plan, there are some words that we use to get us started off, the very first thing you're going to use is, in my opinion, comma, and this is where you get to state your opinion.

Okay.

And the first thing is our plan is line dot, dot dot.

That's the plan that we use to organize our thoughts.

They don't have to be complete sentences, they can just be some of our thoughts so that we can make them into better sentences when we're done.

It's just an organization tool, topic, sentence detail sentences.

And I'm going to make four of them because we have four paragraphs.

So in my opinion, comma will go on your top line.

And then we have some transition words that we're going to use and Mrs. Hayes can fill these in as we go along.

Okay, so our first transition word is first first comma, our next paragraph is going to start with also comma.

Our third paragraph will be Furthermore, comma.

And our last paragraph will be in conclusion.

Now when we write an opinion essay, we have to have at least two places where we cite our source.

So you can see Mrs. Hayes is filled in the source states.

According to the article, you could do several different ways of saying this.

You have to have it at least twice in your opinion essay.

Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and make my plan on why I think my opinion is that plastic bag should not be banned.

So in my opinion, and I'll just write my opinion.

Plastic bags should not be banned.

Okay, first, this is I'm going to get my first reason and I'm just going to put Sophie here.

Again, it doesn't have to be a complete sentence.

Just my thoughts.

The source states.

Well, my sources were those articles that I read, and I believe it did say in there exactly that but they don't get soggy.

They don't get wet.

So the bags, plastic bags, do not get wet.

Okay, and then this.is a free detailed sentence about what I think what I feel what I know about my first reason, and I'm just going to say something about that.

Care, I'm going to put carrying groceries in the rain so that when I go to make my sentence, I know that's what I'm talking about.

Alright, Also I'm going to get Reason number two, it has to be different than the first one.

So also, plastic bags are reusable.

Okay, so with them being reusable, I know that all of my three dots are my details, and they have to go back to my topic.

Alright, the source states.

The source, the article that I read said that plastic bags were reusable.

So I can use exactly that.

Since I said the source states.

And then I get two free detailed sentences about my topic sentence that plastic bags are reusable.

So I'm going to put lunch, that'll remind me when I'm writing to make a sentence about the fact that I use them to put my lunch in them.

And the other thing I use them for is as trash bags, by my house, like in my bathroom.

Okay, furthermore, not done yet, I've got another reason.

So Furthermore, I have more to say I need one more reason.

That's not my also reason, that's not my first reason.

So Furthermore, and I'm going to put the homeless blanket here.

Because that's what I want that topic to be about for this paragraph.

And I get three free detailed sentences here.

So I'm just going to say something about making blankets would be fun.

Making blankets from bags would be fun.

Awesome, also going to say something about plastic bags are very useful.

And then I'll remember that I can say something about making things there.

And my third one, I'm just going to say something about being smart and resourceful.

So I'll just put that there.

And my plan, I know what I'm going to say whenever I did is type this or write it.

And in conclusion, this is the best paragraph because I just get to go back and restate my opinion.

My first reason my also reason my furthermore reason, and I'm just wrapping this up and trying to sell my opinion.

So in conclusion, plastic fat should not be banned.

I've done all the hard work.

So now I just get to restate things.

So first, there's soggy I'll know to put that sentence there.

Here I'm going to I'm going to put my also And furthermore, reasons together to make a compound sentence number one, that gives me different sentence structure, which is good.

I haven't done that yet.

And I can, I won't be leaving any of my reasons out.

So plastic bags are reusable.

And I'll use that comma.

And that's my reminder to do a compound sentence and homeless like it.

And my last dot, I'm just going to throw in for all of these reasons.

And restate that opinion again.

So I this is like I just want to restate.

This is my plan.

I have not done all complete sentences.

But I do have those triggers.

Let me know what I want to do.

For each sentence.

I'm going to have four paragraphs.

It's all organized just like your room should be organized.

You don't want to have things everywhere.

We want everything to be together that belongs together.

That's how our paragraphs are all right.

Mrs. Jones had her plan made already because her opinion was different.

Then you can see I followed the same format.

I followed the line dot dot dot.

I have my transition words I have my sources I have my opinion and my conclusion.

Okay, so now we are ready to write based on our plan.

So I went ahead and typed up my essay.

You can see I have four paragraphs.

I checked it for spelling capitalization, I have my transition words two sources are cited here I have that compound sentence and I even use the power of because to make my sentences more detailed from my plan.

And I'm ready to publish it publishing it means I'm sending it out to be graded Thanks for watching.

Thanks Miss Jones and Miss Hayes.

Alright, so next up, we've got an exciting science lesson.

Dr. Su plida is going to help us better understand what goes on in our brains while we dream.

This should be interesting.

Let's check it out.

My name is Dr. Rich salita and we're doing a follow up for our our unit on on sleep.

And we want to talk more specifically about dreams.

What's going on with dreaming?

Okay, so both in terms of the brain physiology the brain function, what's happening there during REM or rapid eye movement sleep that's causing us to dream?

But also the more fascinating question that turns out to be also much more difficult to answer.

What do our our dreams mean?

Okay, so we'll start out with the physiology because it's more clear cut.

And so what we see happening in the brain during sleep with the the waves, the brain waves, is we see something called PG o waves.

And what this stands for, if you remember our overview of brain anatomy, we talked about the pons here on the in the lower parts of the brain, right?

The Pons is the P, the G stands for geniculate, that's sort of a weird word actually is short for something much longer the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus, the thalamus is the main relay center in the brain.

And then the O stands for the occipital lobe, okay, the visual parts of the brain here in the back of the head, I put an eye here in the front, so you'll know that this is the back part of the brain.

This is where our conscious experience of vision takes place neurologically.

And so what in pgl waves, what you see happening is, the pons will, will spike with activity, there's a burst of activity in the pons, followed by a burst of activity in the lateral geniculate nucleus, followed by a burst of activity in the occipital lobe.

And so this is part of the normal this last link, the geo is part of the normal system, like right now, when I'm awake, my eyes are open information is coming in, it's coming into my eyes, it gets relayed through my optic nerve back to my geniculate nucleus to the G and then back to my occipital lobe.

And that helps my brain create what I register as visual awareness.

But see, when you're asleep, your eyes are closed, and the signals not coming from your eyes.

It's originating here in the ponds.

But nevertheless, the occipital lobe of the brain, those visual centers are being activated.

And so what happens is, the rest of the brain is going to try to figure out it's trying is going to try to make some sense out of these signals, and it's going to interpret those as different people, different places, different things happening, okay.

And so we call this the activation synthesis hypothesis, the pgmo waves activate the visual centers in the brain.

And as I mentioned, the rest of the cortex is going to do the best job that it can, trying to make some sort of sense out of those signals, okay?

the prefrontal cortex, these frontal regions of the brain, we talked about this before, they're associated with, like logic and reason decision making.

The PFC are the prefrontal cortex has very low metabolic activity.

during REM sleep, the rest of the brain is very active, the PFC has low activity.

And because of this, our dreams follow what we would consider to be very loose narratives.

They're kind of flighty, they, they jump from one topic to the next.

Or sometimes in my own dreams, I'm talking to a certain person, okay.

And, and then the next scene, that person like changes into another person, it's the strangest stuff, but in the dream, we just kind of go with the flow, because the PFC is not on and it's not worried about detecting errors and things that don't make sense.

Okay, so dreams tend to lack an overall sense of coherence.

Now, according to this hypothesis, and this personally for me does square with my own experiences.

The content of dreams tends to often involve relatively peripheral things or minutiae from the previous day.

Maybe on the way home from work, you got stuck in a traffic jam and you're there.

There's all those orange cones there along the highway that we all love, right?

Well, your brain might pick up on something that's a minutiae like that and Find a way to work that into your dream somehow.

Okay, especially if that was unusual that day.

Okay, according to this hypothesis, and this kind of I feel like I'm the guy that's telling you that magics not real, you know.

But but there's little profound, there's relatively little profound meaning to be discovered in our dreams.

And I want to contrast this with here in the second part, with earlier psychologists, like Sigmund Freud, okay, Sigmund Freud placed a big emphasis on dream analysis.

And so we'll talk a little bit here about Freudian dream analysis.

To understand this, you've got to understand a little bit about how Freud understood the human mind to work.

And so the most common illustration is what we call the iceberg illustration.

Okay, so y'all are familiar with icebergs, there's only a little bit of the iceberg that sticks up above the surface of the ocean, right?

The main mass of the iceberg is submerged, you can't see it from the surface.

So accordingly, Freud said that the conscious mind is like the tip of the iceberg.

that's relatively little of our mind, even when we're awake.

Only a little bit of our mental energy only a little bit of our, our psyche is involved with with consciousness and conscious awareness.

What he says is that most of the mind, most of the human psyche, your mind, involves activity happening there, on the subconscious or the unconscious level, underneath the surface of awareness.

Okay, so According to this theory, Freud says that dreams, especially, it's not just dreams, but primarily it's dreams, serve as messengers from the subconscious mind, to the conscious mind.

Okay, and this is why there's all this fascination with dream analysis.

So Freud says that with proper interpretation, we can understand what these what these secret these hidden messages are.

And very often our dreams can inform us about things like conflicts happening with relationships, and that sort of thing, our deepest fears, our desires, and even things like repressed memories, the idea that traumatic things happen to us long ago, and they were so psychologically painful that we suppress them to the point that we're not even aware of them anymore.

Perhaps those can come back to us in certain types of symbols and our dreams, okay.

Okay, so, Freud also says, you know, Freud used the term ID, ego and super ego.

Freud says that dreams are the epitome of ego centrism.

So they're literally all about you, okay?

And because dreams are generated entirely within your brain, every person in your dream is either think about is either either a projection of you yourself, right, or a symbol of what that person means to you.

And so dreams are totally egocentric.

I used to tell my class that dreams are like onions, in the sense that they have different layers, there's different layers to dreams, there's a superficial, superficial layer, and then there's a deeper understanding which involves dream analysis, dream interpretation.

And so, Sigmund Freud, Sigmund Shlomo Freud, that was his middle name.

Sigmund Freud wrote a book called The interpretation of dreams, it was right around the turn of the 19th, the 20th century can actually download that as a PDF for free online if you're interested in reading that.

But he talks about these layers, he talks about the manifest content of dreams and the latent content of dream.

Now, the manifest content of dreams is literally what happens in the dream.

Okay.

So for example, a person might have a dream, most of us have had a dream like this at some point in our life.

We're in public, we look down, we're at school, we're in our underwear.

And so we kind of freak out, you know, I'm standing here I'm naked, I'm only in my underwear, how embarrassing.

This is going to be when people notice it.

So that would be the manifest content of the dream, the literal content, but he says the important message from our subconscious mind is not that the important message is found in the latent content.

And so that is what your nakedness would symbolize in this instance.

Okay?

So perhaps your nakedness symbolizes something like a fear of failing, a fear of being shown to be incompetent and a certain line of work.

Let's say or maybe having your secrets revealed that would be the latent content, what your subconscious mind is really experiencing a large degree of anxiety about so much has been written a whole lot of ink has been spilled on dreams, Dream analysis, dream interpretation, but I wanted to give you just a little bit of a flavor for that.

Thanks, Doctor depleted.

Alright, as I'm sure we're all aware, we've been spending a lot of time at home lately, which is why it's so important to consider our expectations for behavior at home.

For a more detailed look at this topic, let's go visit Miss semen.

Hello, my name is Alicia zeeman.

I am the PB II s coordinator at the West Virginia behavior mental health Technical Assistance Center.

We are a collaboration between West Virginia's autism Training Center at Marshall University in the West Virginia Department of Education, Office of Special Education and student support.

Every day in my job, I get to work with the best educators in schools in the state.

And because of this experience, I want to share a secret with you.

What we as educators know is that students function best in a certain type of an environment.

That environment is an environment that is nurturing, consistent, safe and responsive.

That seems like a lot.

But I want to tell you that we can make all environments, nurturing, safe, consistent and responsive.

We can do that by providing expectations for our students.

When we do that, we know that our students and your children will have more consistency within their lives and behavior will change.

Expectations are really important, because they allow us to be on the same page about what we are expecting within our homes.

Author and researcher Bernie Brown says a quote that I love she says clear is kind, unclear is unkind.

That's exactly what we're asking you to do.

Let's speak clearly communicating to our kids at our home, what we're expecting of them, what are characteristics and values and behaviors that we want to see in our environment, we can expect children to behave in certain ways if we haven't clearly set a foundation of what we need to see from them.

When we set this foundation, we also have to make sure that we are taking time to model the expectations and giving them opportunities to practice, practice practice.

Let's talk more about what it looks like to set expectations in your home.

Let's talk about how we begin to establish expectations in our homes.

Typically, when we begin to talk about expectations to children, we break them into two categories.

those categories are big rules and little rules.

Big rules are essentially the characteristics or values that we want our children to have.

And the little rules or the direct behaviors that they're going to do to show us that they understand those characteristics and values.

Any characteristic that you think of that would be important for your family could be appropriate for making expectations in your home.

When we think about expectations in the schools, we typically think of things like responsibility or respectfulness, or kindness, or safety, those may work for you.

Or maybe you have some ideas of your own.

Remember, when we begin to make these big rules, we will only want to have about three to five of them.

We want them to be easy for children to remember and easy for us to be able to teach.

We also want to make sure that these expectations are stated positively.

So maybe instead of saying Don't be mean, we will state that as Be kind.

family meetings can be the perfect opportunity to talk about what big rules you would like to have to guide your family.

You can start the discussion with what are the favorite qualities of people that they love.

If you have school aged children, you can ask them for what the expectations are in the school that they go to.

Young children will need guidance to grab the right vocabulary but they will know what actions have made them feel safe and supported before.

In our family meeting we chose the big rules of be safe, be responsible and be excellent.

Once you've decided on your big rules, you can begin to discuss what your little rules may be.

These little rules will show you the actions that your family needs to take to show your shared values.

You will need to identify the area Are times of your day that you need little rules for.

Often we can identify these times by the amount of drama we endure during them.

Do you struggle with getting your child to bed?

Are they always jumping up and down when he leaves the room, maybe you need little rules that will explain how to be safe, how to be responsible, or whatever big rules, you have decided upon ideas like I can be safe by laying in my bed, and I can have gentle head hands at bedtime.

Maybe they need guidance, direct guidance on how to be responsible responsible to mama means plugging in their iPad and brushing their teeth.

Remember that these rules apply to everyone in the family, including you having big rules and little rules alone are not enough, they're going to need many opportunities to see them in action and to practice them as well.

In inevitably, our kids are going to mess up.

Nobody's perfect 100% of the time.

And even if we have a strong foundation of expectations, sometimes emotions come into play in our children have issues with behavior.

The center on PBS has four steps for how we can correct behavior that we do not want to see that doesn't match our big rules and little rules.

The first step is to quickly and calmly state the error, it might sound like this, Hey, buddy, that was not respectful.

The second step is to repeat what the expectation is, Hey, man, I know you're really upset.

But in this house, we show kindness with our words.

And that's how we show respect.

The third step is to provide them an opportunity to try again, because this is where the learnings that, Hey, I know you're really upset with your brother, but I need you to try to find some gentle words to use with him to let him know, in the fourth step is to praise that that chance that they took to show you that they're doing the best they can to meet our expectations.

A couple other tips from the center on PBS is that we want to try to make sure that we're having more positive interactions, the negative interactions.

So more behavior, specific praise about the things that you want to see, then corrections.

And when we are talking about corrections may be reminders of what the expectations that we've worked so hard to build together as a family are.

When we work together to set expectations up in our home, or any environment that we're operating in.

We're allowing everybody in that environment to have a chance of success.

Remember, parenting is hard.

Growing up is hard.

Being a kid is hard.

But the clearer we can be for our kids, the better off we are in our home environments.

If you'd like more information on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, please visit us@www.wvpbis.org.

Thanks, Miss zemin.

All right.

Well, that wraps up everything for us here today on Education Station.

We want to thank everyone who shared their awesome lessons.

And we want to thank you for watching.

We'll see you next time right here on Education Station.