Skip to main content

Let's Explore the Earth, Sun, and Moon!



Today was the first day of really teaching for me and my group! We are currently teaching to a fourth-grade classroom at Bishop Dunn.  After many hours of working together on our direct instruction presentation and getting our materials ready it was finally time.  The topic that we were teaching to the students was the Earth, Sun, and Moon.  The students seemed really excited about this topic since they already knew some stuff about it and were eager to learn more.  Our first lesson was our direct instruction lesson where we taught the students all the information they would need to know about the Earth, Sun, and Moon.  We taught them a fun way to remember rotation and revolution using their hands.  Throughout the lesson we would ask the students questions to check their understanding after a student would answer we used the thumbs up/down method to see if the rest of the class agreed with the answer that was said.  My group and I also used the method of turn and talk with a partner before and after we had taught them the information.  I noticed that when we had the students turn and talk we would have trouble getting their attention back even if we were using 1,2,3 eyes on me.  We could have maybe switched up the method for getting their attention throughout the lesson.  After we had finished our presentation we did an activity with the students that would help them remember the information that they just learned.

 For this activity, we provided the students with sentence strips of the important vocabulary words and concepts from the presentation.  We left a blank in the sentence and the students would work in groups to figure out the missing word.  After one of the four teachers would go over the answer with the whole class on the board.  The students really liked this activity because they were able to work together to find the answers.  One thing that my group and I could have done differently during this activity is handed the strips out one at a time, instead of all at once.  This way the students are not doing all of them at one time and going ahead of the class.  After this activity, we gave the students a small quiz to do to see what they had learned from the lesson.

 Overall it was a great first day of teaching!  I gained new knowledge from teaching the first lesson, and I now have new techniques that I can use to improve the next lesson that we are going to be teaching the students. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Keeping Your Candy Cool with the Power of Evaporation

For my class, it was a requirement that we complete a science fair project.  For my project, I did keeping your candy cool with the power of evaporation.  This experiment helps explain the process of evaporation in a fun way.  I chose this experiment to gain more knowledge on how evaporation works.  Before I started doing this experiment I knew what evaporation was but I did not know that it could keep the candy from melting, so it was really neat to see how that works.  In one of the articles that I read it talked about how when evaporation is used to cool an object, it is called evaporation cooling and it is one of the greatest phenomena.  One thing that I found interesting from reading the articles is that when we sweat that it is our body trying to cool down.  Our bodies are using evaporation cooling to keep us cool so that we do not overheat and pass out on a hot day.  This was something that I did not know before doing this experiment an...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fun with Fossils

Today during class me and two of my other classmates taught a lesson to the class on fossils.  Fossils were something that we and my classmates were not too familiar with so we figured the best way to learn was by learning it ourselves and then teaching it to the rest of the class.  Not only did we learn a lot more about fossils but we also got more experience with teaching!  We designed a full lesson with a pretest, development, and posttest.   To pre-assess the class we showed them a picture of a fossil and asked the class if anymore knew what this was a picture of.  After a small pre-assessment, we moved into the development part of our lesson, where we had lots of information to share about fossils.  We taught the class about what a fossil is, the different kinds of things that it can tell us, and how they are formed.  We showed a short video to help further explain how fossils were formed and also what we could use fossils for. Once we...
Post a Comment
Read more

Scientific Inquiry

Students today are noticing everything in the world around them, they are coming up with questions about why things are the way they are.  As teachers, it is our job to make sure our students understand the answers to these questions.  Students often have misconceptions about certain things or a topic in general.  Their misconceptions are how we as teachers know where to start teaching them. Inquiry-based learning starts with a question that the students have to answer through solving problems.  The cycle for inquiry learning starts with asking an "I wonder" question and then having the students brainstorm possible ways to figure out the answer to the question, this is called the acquisition part of the cycle.  After they have brainstormed they come up with an "I think" statement and then design a plan and test it.  After they have tested they collect their results and analyze them and get ready to share with the rest of the class.  Students...
Post a Comment
Read more