Second Lesson

The second lesson for our unit went really well. I felt much more comfortable going in to teach this lesson because I had already taught one lesson by myself and I also knew the students and their names better.

This lesson was about the effects of natural events on species. I began the lesson by briefly reviewing what we did in the first lesson. Then I moved into a PowerPoint presentation which included before and after pictures of a flood, a fire, erosion, and disease. I asked the students to describe the before picture for each event, the after pictures, and then what would have happened to plants and animals living in each habitat. I was surprised by the quality of discussion the students had about these pictures. They gave very detailed and observant descriptions of the pictures and had great ideas about what would have happened to the species that could have lived in each picture. All of the students seemed very engaged and lots of students had comments to add to the discussion. I think this activity really helped them to understand just how powerfully natural events can effect species. The erosion pictures were particularly helpful because many of the students did not know what erosion was going into this lesson. The pictures gave a great visual image for what erosion can cause.

After this the students participated in experiments that represented different types of erosion. I split the students into three groups of six and there were three different experiments. Since the experiments were not difficult and one of them was not very interesting, I planned on having each group go to each station so that they could do all of the experiments. However, the experiments took longer than I expected and we only had time to do two rotations. This part of the lesson was somewhat difficult because I was instructing students with the most difficult experiment while the other two groups were essentially on their own doing the other two experiments. The other two experiments were very simple and even though I explained these experiments to the whole class before I split them up into groups, I had direction cards ready for the two experiments I would not really be supervising to make sure that the students knew what to do. This was fine, except that some minor incidents regarding who got to do what still arose and it was hard for me to manage since I was trying to help the third group of students with the more complicated experiment. I should have used some more behavior management strategies during this part of the lesson, but honestly, it kind of slipped my mind at the time and it was a little challenging to get the students' attention after each experiment rotation.

After cleaning up the experiments, we discussed as a class how each experiment represented erosion. As a formative assessment and to bring closure to the lesson, I had the students fill out their cause and effect worksheets that they had started in the first lesson based on what they had learned during the second lesson.

Overall, I think this lesson went very well. The timing and pacing were right on target. The students were engaged and excited and after looking over their cause and effect worksheets, they seemed to grasp the concepts from the lesson.

Unit Planning

I think our unit planning went very well. Since we had already planned on teaching our unit right after spring break, Alison and I were able to work on it a lot over spring break, both together and independently. We had everything done before we started teaching our unit at all except for our last lesson and to type out our final draft of our summative assessment. Since our schedules and the schedule of our class conflict a lot, we worked it out so that we would both teach two lessons independently and the last lesson together. I taught the first and second lessons while Alison taught the third and fourth lessons. Although we would have liked to be able to teach together, or at least to be able to observe each other's lessons, we decided that it would be best to split things up this way for the benefit of our students. We did not think it would make a lot of sense to have to carry the unit over three weeks just so that we could both be in the classroom at the same time. I was also excited, though a bit nervous too, about teaching a lesson on my own because I had never done that before. I thought now was a perfect opportunity to get some practice with this since we would still have our classroom teacher to give us feedback on our teaching.

Even though we taught separately, we planned the general outline of our unit and all of the activities and assessments we would do during our unit together. This was a good thing to do so that we were both on the same page with the unit as a whole and knew what each other was going to cover. We both created the lesson plans for the lessons we taught individually by oursevles regarding the specific content covered and details of how the lesson was going to run. We still shared all of our materials for our lessons though so that we could both see what was going to be covered in each lesson. We created the last lesson together since we team-taught it. We also did not create this lesson plan until the other four lessons were already taught so that we could see how everything went in the unit beforehand. That way, if we needed to reteach something, we would have time in our last lesson to do so. I think this was a good idea, especially because we had a whole week between the fourth lesson and the last lesson in which to create the final lesson plan. It was beneficial for us to be able make sure we covered everything we wanted to.

First Lesson

Yesterday I taught the first lesson for our unit. Although I was a little bit nervous before teaching because this is the first lesson I have taught by myself and without my partner even being there at all, I felt prepared for the lesson. Our regular classroom teacher was absent, but she had already emailed me the day before saying that she was sick and might not be there, but that the substitute would know I was coming so this did not bother me. The substitute is going to be taking over for our teacher when she has her baby in a few weeks so she knew the students fairly well already and had a good handle on behavior management, one area I was a bit worried about with having a substitute teacher in the classroom. I came with plenty of time to set up for my lesson and make sure everything was working. Luckily, I brought my PowerPoint presentation on a disk because the internet did not seem to be working.

When the students first came in, the substitute introduced them all to me because she wanted to practice their names as well. I was going to do this as part of my lesson anyway so this worked out well. It is a little disappointing not to be teaching all of the students from our regular class, but by the end of this first lesson I think I knew almost all of their names already. I started the lesson by explaining that my partner and I were going to be teaching them a unit in the next two weeks and that there would be a test at the end. Then I went into an introduction to what we would be learning during the unit with a PowerPoint presentation. This went well. When preparing for the lesson, I decided that the students probably did not know what an organism is. This word is important for our unit and is used in the title so I wanted to make sure students knew what it was. As I predicted, they did not have a clear idea of the word's meaning so I gave them an easy definition of "a living thing" and was glad I had gone over this.

After this introduction to the unit, I told them that we were going to be reading an article on polar bears. I asked them what they knew about polar bears to access their prior knowledge before reading the article. I was surprised by their responses of things like "global warming is killing all of the polar bears." I did not expect this level of response which threw me off a little because the article was about just that topic and most of the students appeared already to know this information. I think they still enjoyed the article though and hopefully it added new information to what they already knew, or served to reinforce their prior knowledge. After the article, I gave them some information on the Endangered Species Act and examples of endangered species to help them better understand the article. I had also planned to go over the difference between threatened and endangered species, but when I asked them about this, they already knew the difference without any prompting from me. Then we discussed their thoughts on the article. The class participated very well in the discussion and it was apparent that they had understood the main ideas of the article. They also seemed quite interested in the topic.

Then I passed out a cause and effect worksheet to each student. I explained that we were going to be using these worksheets throughout the unit. I instructed them to label some boxes with particular titles and then to think about a cause and effect we read about in the article. They understood this concept and were easily able to come up with global warming as a cause and polar bears becoming endangered as an effect. Then we discussed whether global warming would be a natural event or human influence. This was a more contradictory topic for the students and I got conflicting answers. However, they did come to decide on labeling it as a human influence because it is caused by pollution which people create.

The final activity of this lesson was to review what we were going to be learning about during the unit and then to have each student write down one question they had about anything we were going to be teaching during the unit. Some students complained that they could not think of a question, but others came up with more than one. This was the end of my lesson, however we still had about 8 minutes left of the class period. I had prepared another article for students to read in case we had extra time, but I did not think we would have had enough time to read a second article and then discuss it. Instead, I had them choose a book to look at for the rest of the period from a bin of books that Alison had brought in last week on our unit. While they were looking at their books, I asked if anyone found anything interesting that they wanted to share with the class. I got several responses from students which showed that they were interested in the topic and what they were reading about. Some of the students were really excited about this, but a few others were not and I could tell they were looking at books unrelated to our unit.

Overall, I think the lesson went very well. I feel a bit unsure of how I handled the awkward amount of time left at the end of the class. Maybe I should have had them start reading the second article instead? After looking at their cause and effect worksheets, I also think I should have modeled more clearly how they were to label these because about four or five students out of 16 labeled them incorrectly. I think I will review this again more clearly in the second lesson because these worksheets are an integral part of our unit. I also looked at the questions they wrote down about the unit and many of them seemed very interested in global warming.

One final thing I noticed when teaching this lesson was that some students raised their hands constantly to answer questions and contribute to the discussion while others never did. I am not quite sure of how to handle this. I did provide more wait time when only one or two students were raising their hands to give other students a chance to answer and sometimes I called on students who were not raising their hands. However, I do not like putting students on the spot like that.

Field Visit #3

I did not feel very useful during this field visit because we were not able to help our teacher or students with anything. Most of the visit was spent observing the class during their literacy block in which the teacher had reading groups while other students read independently at their desks or used the computer. A parent came in to lead one reading group as well. I think it is great to see parents volunteering in the classroom. Not only does it provide a good example for the students, but also helps the teacher out a lot. One interesting thing I observed during this visit was a lesson on highlighting important words in questions. It did not take very long and it was obvious that the class had done this before. They went through a series of about five questions as a class and each student highlighted the important words in the questions as they went through them on their own papers. Then they went back and answered the questions. This must be part of the preparation for the SOLs. I found it interesting because usually we see teachers focused on content learning for the SOLs, but here I got to see a class practicing test taking strategies as well. Alison and I were also able to look at the students' science books in order to take notes and prepare for our unit.

When the block one science class came in, we gave them our preassessment for our unit since this is the class to which we will be teaching our unit. In some ways it is a little disappointing because although some of the students from our regular class are in this block one class, there are many other students from other third grade classes in block one as well so we do not know all of the students as well as we would like to. The preassessment went well though. All students were able to complete the assessment in about 10-15 minutes. Hopefully it will give us a good indication of where our students stand in regard to our unit.