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.