On Wednesday I taught science in my
Professional Development School (PDS) placement. I have been placed in a first
grade classroom at Oakland school. Through my time there, I have taken over
most of the language arts instruction but have not yet had the opportunity to
teach a science lesson. Through a requirement in this science course, I was
able to sit down and talk to my cooperating teacher about implementing a science
lesson. In our classroom, we do science every other week, and social studies
the opposite weeks. I was able to choose which science topic I wanted to teach
about, either Day and Night or on Ecosystems specifically the Food Chain.
I chose to focus on Day and Night and went
through the curriculum book to pick out a lesson. My cooperating teacher works
with another first grade teacher quite closely and together they develop slides
in the program, Smart Notebook. I needed to make a decision on whether or not I
wanted to just use the Smart Notebook slides or if I wanted to venture off and
create a whole new lesson. I decided that since my students are familiar with
the Smart Notebook slides, which I wanted to somehow incorporate them. I
decided that I would research an activity to help supplement the material
presented in the Smart Notebook presentation of Day and Night. I specifically
chose to focus on the second lesson in the unit which talked about what
determines day and what determines night, and introduces the vocabulary term of
rotation. Prior to teaching my lesson, I spent time on sites like Pinterest and
Teachers Pay Teachers to find a quick and easy activity to help supplement the content
presented. Through research, I found a craft in which visually demonstrates the
Earth’s, the suns, and lastly the moons rotation to help the children visually
see how those rotations define day and night.
When time came for me to teach my
lesson, I became somewhat nervous. I was nervous because I do not have much
experience with teaching science, and I have only seen my cooperating teacher
actually teach science a few times. This has happened because I am in charge of
a fourth grade reading Response to Intervention (RTI) group. My group meets
during social studies or science time so this is one area that I feel less
confident in teaching. My cooperating teacher did a really great job prior to
my teaching affirming me and boosting my confidence. As I gathered the students
to the carpet, I felt somewhat relieved because I knew no matter what I was
teaching, they were going to be prepared to learn as long as I set them up for
success and modeled the same practices that I model earlier in the day when
implementing my language arts instruction. There are specific practices that my
cooperating teacher uses across the whole day regardless of which content area
she is instructing. To gain the students attention and quiet them down, she says “Sh Sh Sh”, and the students
repeat and then are expected to be silent and wait for directions. This is the
strategy I use to begin any sort of instruction or assign any sort of
direction, and it is the tactic I used to gain my students attention before beginning
the science lesson.
As
I have mentioned above, I followed the Smart Notebook slides when
presenting the content knowledge to the students and I framed the instruction
like a discussion like I have seen my cooperating teacher do the few times I was
able to observe her teaching. The students started off being really engaged but
as it seems to be a usual occurrence with not only children in general but specifically
our students, we quickly had those few friends who started looking off, talking
aloud, talking to others, or playing with various things on the carpet. For my
personal preference when teaching, I do not found it helpful to stop and
correct each of those behaviors. I think you will always have kids that are
looking around but if you take the time to stop for every little thing, a half
an hour lesson could easily turn into an hour. My cooperating teacher and I have
been talking a lot this semester about whether the behavior is a problem for
the classroom or just for you, meaning does the behavior impair the learning of
others, if not and it just annoys you then those are things that you have to
work to just get over. As teachers, we need to pick our battles and chose to correct
the behaviors that will impair either the students the learning or the students
around him or her. So this is an idea that I try to take with me when I am
teaching my students. I have started reflecting on which behaviors are problems
or are just an annoyance to me that I can see myself having to work on to just
get over. Of course, as we have discussed, these things change year to year
when you have different students in your classroom.
With all of these thoughts in my mind,
I chose to correct behaviors that were impairing the learning during my lesson.
After we moved from the carpet to their desks, my students were excited to
begin the crafting task and were all extremely engaged. My students love
coloring so I knew I would have to put time constraints on that and the best
way to show students this is to use our visual time timer that we have in the
classroom. I knew even with this strategy I would have children that continued
to work at a different pace, so I did my best to work with the pace of the
majority of my students. I gave cutting directions and assembly directions when
it looked like the majority of the classroom was ready to move on. I have three students in my classroom that
have cutting modifications so I had to go over to them specifically and cut
their large pieces out and they could take on the smaller cutting tasks
themselves. I have one student in my classroom that gets ELL support from our
ELL instructor. However, his family is starting to wonder if he needs it
because he is able to understand all direction and effectively communicate back
to us what he thinks or needs. So I didn’t feel that any modifications needed
to be made for him. However, after working at Brigham, I feel more confident
that if I would have needed to make accommodations, I would have been able to
do those more quickly.
Overall the lesson was successful,
my students loved it (they have told me how much they like it days after the
lesson), and the students were able to grasp the content knowledge that I was
working to get across. Here is a picture of the model we created!
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