Inner Planets

After my group had finished teaching about the Earth and its patterns the second group began the next day teaching about the inner planets.  They started their direct instruction lesson by setting some ground rules for the students to follow and had a really cute way of getting the students attention, mac and cheese eyes on me and the students would respond with beef stew eyes on you.  They pre-assessed the students with a word cloud and had a live stream of what the Earth looked like at that exact time, this really got the students engaged in what they were going to be learning about.  Throughout the lesson the students were to take notes in the note packet that they were given in the beginning of the lesson and this would help them with an exercise that they did later on.  Throughout the lesson the students were doing different things like turning and talking about what the teacher had just taught.  This way the students were able to share their ideas about the answers to the questions that the teachers were asking with each other.  The teachers did a good job of including all of the students when they were asking questions and they did not call on the same students all of the time.  They also used the thumbs up/down to see if the whole class agreed or disagreed with the answer that was given.  For the guided practice they played a Kahoot with the students.  The students really liked this game but they were getting a little competitive and the classroom rules were not being enforced during this time.  For the independent practice the students had to complete a crossword puzzle that consisted of all the important vocabulary from the lesson.  This is where there note packet came in handy!  To check and see how well the students understood the lesson the teachers gave each of the students sticky notes, a red sticky note where they had to write something that they did not understand, yellow where they wrote something that they did understand but could use some more help with, and green where they wrote something that they understood completely.  The students would go up to the stoplight that was on the board and stick their sticky notes on the matching colors.  This way the teachers had an idea of what the students understood from the lesson and what they need to reinforce before starting their next lesson.

Once the teachers had finished their direct instruction lesson the next part was to see what the students remember from the lesson and would be able to apply to the next lesson.  The next lesson that the teachers had planned was and inquiry lesson.  The students would have to solve some kind of problem involving the inner planets and other things that they learned about in the direct instruction lesson.  To go over the important things that they learned in the last lesson the teachers put a chart up on the board and asked the students yes or no questions and to put their thumbs up if yes and down if no.  The teachers had a really neat way of introducing the problem to the students, they used a tellagami of an alien.  This got the students really excited and engaged about what they were going to be doing.  For the activity the students would have to feel the "mystery bag" and make observations about it.  After they gathered all of their observations they would come to a conclusion as a group as to what planet they think they might have.  After they came to their conclusions all of the groups shared their findings with the rest of the class.