Last Day at Brigham

Today was our last day to have the opportunity to interact with the pre-K students at Brigham Elementary School.  Within our small groups, we were tasked to create a lesson in which the students would be engaged with the standards surrounding the scientific concept of engineering. When first given this task, I was weary with apprehension because this was a subject area that I did not feel as confident about. As a small group, we took quite a while to brainstorm different ideas on how we could go about explaining this concept to our students. After much discussion, we finally settled on the idea of teaching students engineering through an activity involving parachutes. We thought through different objects that would drop at different speeds so students could understand the concept of force and how ti relates to object weight. We chose objects like an eraser, a marker, a rock, a ball, and lastly a shoe. We first introduced the concept by reading the students a book, then after noticing that there were nine students in the classroom, with two more coming in from the hallway, we decided to split the group up.

I worked with Megan and we decided to review the text before jumping right into the activity. In order to engage the students in the activity, we asked them to be the ones that would drop the parachute to the ground. We tried to ask the same questions repeatedly throughout the lesson to work hard to get our point across that the heavier objects take a faster plunge than objects with less weight. We dropped the parachute two times so students could clearly see the speed of the parachute dropping especially if they happened to not be focused in the front of the classroom where we were at that moment. The second time is when I measured the time and then shared the time with the students so they could start to think about how fast things would go considering most time increments were around one second. The students seemed to be really excited and engaged throughout the activity but I leave concerned about their comprehension of the main concepts of the lesson. Students seemed to keep shouting “Fast or faster” throughout the lesson without really listening to our questions, so I just happen to wonder about if they really do understand the concept. A couple of students once we started comparing and contrasting the different objects used, they were able to differentiate the two and were able to tell Megan and I which would fall faster and which one would fall slower. We just kept trying to repeat throughout the lesson that we were working on their understanding of objects slowing down when they are attached to a parachute. One thing I wish we would have done differently was plan to drop two objects at once so the students could use firsthand the comparison between objects and their speeds. We noticed towards the end of the lesson that the two other teachers, Alaina and Ali, were doing this and in the interest of time, we just had our students turn around to see and I think this also helped deepen their understanding so if I were to do this lesson again, that would be something I would change.

As far as my goals go, I again want to make the point that any opportunity in the classroom is an improvement because it allows me to gain more experience and have more exposure to working with students in a diverse setting. To help students understand the key words of “fast” and “slow” we used hand movements and when saying the word “slow”, we emphasized the word  by producing the word in a slow format, so we dragged the word out and said “sssslllllllooooowww” instead of just saying “slow” as an everyday term. I believe that this played a role in their understanding of the parachute because the students then started to mimic our phrasing and apply it to the parachuted objects correctly.