As I mentioned last week, I'm
working my way through my Term III assignments. Today I actually taught the first of my lessons -- and it went really well!
This was my lesson which I submitted last week, for my Science in Elementary Schools class. It was a "rocks and minerals" intro lesson. I chose the subject because it's the unit that third graders are supposed to be doing at about now. In my classroom, I've gotten to see pretty minimal amounts of science instruction so far -- sadly, not an uncommon situation in Philly public schools -- but our school has a pretty nifty "Rocks and Minerals" kit, so it seemed like a great place to start.
The lesson that I did was a fun set of hands-on activities, focused on rock/mineral observation and classification practices. Some individual observations with magnifying glasses, some partner work (compare your specimens, then practice classification - e.g., which rocks do/don't sparkle, which rocks are/aren't green), then some whole group work (practicing classification with "20 Questions," then working as a group on "What
is a rock?"). Okay, so if you're not an 8-year-old science-deprived child, maybe all that rock stuff sounds boring, but the kids were totally into it and I've got witnesses and video to prove it.
So, that's one down, and three to go: literacy, math, and social studies.
For all of these lessons, we're allowed to structure our student groups with an aim to neutralize classroom management as an issue. At the same time, we're supposed to have an overarching question tying together all of our lessons, and mine has to do with partner work as a strategy for working with diverse learners -- in my case, aiming to get students collaborating with other students who might have very different learning styles or academic/behavioral experiences. To help me generate my groups, I've decided to try to involve every student in my class in at least one lesson, and I let them choose their lessons; I did a sign-up for student first and second choices, and I've been making my groups based on that. I'm excited to see how the rest of these go!
On a separate note -- it's felt really great getting to have some pretty successful lessons (I did a couple large-group math talks last week that went well too), given how much of a struggle my classroom has been in general, management-wise. It's a pretty tough class, by universal acclaim, but the kids are also pretty awesome. Looking forward to using Term III as an excuse to work with each of them more closely in the coming weeks. Weird how few weeks are left before the end of the term...
