Last Lesson!

I can hardly believe it, but this week we taught our last butterfly lesson to the second graders! Alisha and I spent a long time thinking of what we could do for our last lesson to wrap everything up. We decided to relate the life cycle of the butterfly to life cycles of other animals, to show the class that every living thing has a life cycle.

Our two focus points for this week were assessment and differentiating instruction. These are two things that I feel like we have struggled with a little bit throughout the semester- partly because we only drop in once a week and it can be hard to assess each student and differentiate well to meet each student's needs with such limited contact. But we did our best.

This week we assessed the student's work when they completed a human life cycle worksheet (to see if they completed it correctly) and whether or not the students put labels in the right part of our three-circle Venn diagram. In retrospect, it probably would have been a good idea to assess some of the class discussions we had too. To differentiate instruction, we tried to make sure we checked in with students who needed extra help getting going. We also had extension activities ready for students who finished early.

At the very end of our lesson we presented each student with a certificate, and they gave us each cards they wrote and drew themselves! It was really evident that they put a lot of work into the cards, and they wrote some really sweet notes to us. I will miss seeing these enthusiastic kids every Monday, but Alisha and I did get invited to an ice cream party on the last day of school... how can we turn that down? One girl came up to me at the very end and said "Someday I want to be a teacher and come back to this classroom and teach about butterflies!" What a great compliment!!

Time is Flying

This week we taught our next to last lesson. It's hard to believe that we are almost done! The butterflies have been set free, which presented new lesson planning challenges. On one hand, Alisha and I didn't have to worry about which phase the butterflies would be in when we walked through the door. On the other hand, observing the butterflies and discussing what changes were happening has been a major part of our lessons for the last few weeks. This week we decided to put it all together and talk about the full butterfly life cycle.

Our goal this week was to incorporate a technology or engineering component to our lesson. This was somewhat challenging for us. Alisha and I thought about ways to use engineering in our lesson, but we didn't want to do it at the expense of the other content that we thought was really important for our unit. We ended up having the kids construct paper plate models of a butterfly life cycle using pasta, paper leaves, and twigs. This activity was very hands on and involved scissors and glue, which kind of ties in to an engineering framework we found for the lower elementary grades. The kids seemed to enjoy this project and hopefully the pasta shapes will help them to remember the stages of the butterfly life cycle for years to come!

After teaching our lesson, our graduate class talked about the importance of teaching technology and engineering to our future students. The kids take the science standardized tests in fifth grade and technology and engineering make up 25% of the test. This is a little daunting. In most of the schools I have visited, there is such a heavy focus on literacy and math that most science is taught through ELA. Not every school sets aside time every day, or even every week, for science. Now that I see how important it is though, I will try to be creative and work technology and engineering into my classroom throughout the year and within different subject areas.

Lesson 5... Butterflies!

This week Alisha and I planned to teach a lesson about adult butterflies, so we were really hoping that we would walk into the classroom and see lots of butterflies flying around their cages. Luckily, most of our butterflies emerged Monday morning before our class! The timing was perfect- our students were able to observe the butterflies up close for the first time during our science lesson.

Our two main focus points for this lesson were writing in science and the use of technology. These are topics that we have been including in many of our lessons, so it wasn't hard to incorporate them this week.

Our students have been keeping an observation journal for the last few weeks. Each class, they observed the caterpillar and then recorded their observations in writing and drawings. This week we changed the focus a little bit. We asked students to write about where they think their butterflies will go after they are released. The students wrote some really good ideas down. Some talked about how they think their butterflies will go find mallow leaves to lay their eggs on. Others mentioned migration. These ideas are going to help lead into our next two lessons on life cycle and migration.

The second focus was using technology. Alisha and I have been using the classroom overhead projector to show diagrams of caterpillars and butterflies. We give students their own handouts to have at their desks, but it is nice to have the larger image to refer to. Next week we plan on using the teacher's projector to watch a video. Presenting things in multiple ways definitely helps the students. Some need to see the larger images and just listen as we talk about the topic. Others need the page right in front of them to see it up close. By using both, hopefully we are reaching more students than we would with just one or the other.

Next week, the butterflies will be gone. I think the kids will miss having them in the classroom, but we've been lucky to have such a hands-on and interactive unit!

... and this is why science is awesome

Going into this week's lesson I was feeling a little nervous about how things would go. In my first blog post, I admitted that I am a total planner. I like to know what is coming up so I can be prepared. Working with live insects in our science lessons has been challenging for me because we have to be totally flexible and come up with contingency plans for our lessons. When it's a full week between science classes, it's hard to say exactly what state we'll find our little caterpillar friends in!

This week, the caterpillars had almost all entered the chrysalis stage. At the very end of class, I walked around the room holding a chrysalis so students could get a close look. As I sat with one group of girls looking at the chrysalis, it hit me... just a day or two ago, this was a caterpillar crawling around and eating everything it could find. Now it's a little case of black and shiny gold, and in just a few more days, it's going to be a butterfly. That's AMAZING! The girls and I were all awe struck thinking about the transformation the insect had already gone through. Moments like that are why teaching science is awesome. It's worth working through uncertainty with unfamiliar materials to be able to experience moments like this one.

So, with that said, this week we focused on a few different aspects of teaching science: content vocabulary, the flow of the lesson, and addressing science misconceptions. With science, there is often new vocabulary. In our lesson this week, the students made some observations of the caterpillar cups and asked questions about what they saw. They actually asked questions that lead right to our vocabulary words. Alisha and I were able to give the students words like "exoskeleton," "molting," and "chrysalis" as labels for concepts they had already noticed but weren't sure of the scientific term for.

Managing the flow of the lesson involved some serious thought during our planning time as well as some flexibility to improvise and adjust as we were actually teaching. Alisha and I spend a lot of time deciding what order do teach our lesson in while we are planning. We talk about what can transition students logically from one activity to the next. However, as carefully as we plan, we don't always stick to the exact times we write in our lesson plan. We are constantly reassessing as we teach and try to move the lesson along in increments that make sense for the class rather than following our lesson plan exactly.

Finally, the science misconception. Last week, we overheard some students talking about how the caterpillars were spinning cocoons out of their silk. Actually, Vanessa cardui caterpillars become a chrysalis after their final molt. They do not spin a cocoon. We decided that this would be an important misconception to address. It also tied in nicely to our lesson on the chrysalis stage. I think the students understood our explanation. They asked us some really great questions about why the caterpillars produce silk at all that made me feel confident that they absorbed the new information.

All in all, a great week!

The Caterpillars Are Here!

This week the students finally got to meet their new classroom visitors- the caterpillars! Their arrival was delayed due to the freak snow storm that closed schools for most of the week, but the caterpillars all made it through without harm and the kids were very excited to see them. Before we could even get started with our lesson, some of the students started asking if we could come for an extra week to make up for the day we missed. It made me feel great that they are so excited about science and enjoy it so much that they want us to come back! Even better, when Alisha and I started reviewing what we did two or three weeks ago, a lot of the students were able to answer our questions. I guess they are learning some science!

This week we focused on classroom management, science process skills, and the closing of the lesson. Classroom management is something that I think will take some time to get comfortable with. The students in our class are really good and tend to behave very well. Sometimes they get really excited and want to share more with each other when we need their attention back, and that's where I think I need to work a little bit on developing confidence in gaining their attention. The classroom teacher has some cues like "One, two, three, eyes on me!" or the clapping pattern that work well. Classroom management is another area where having a coteacher is great- Alisha and I can both walk around the room to answer questions and check in with groups, so no one has to wait too long and lose focus.

The science process skill we focused on this week was observation. We have worked on this before with the class, but today was the first day they got their caterpillars so we thought it was important for them to get a good look at them. The students used hand lenses to get a close up view of the caterpillars, and they all recorded their observations through writing and drawing. A lot of students labeled their pictures with the parts of the caterpillars that they could see, which shows that they were making some good observations.

With so much observing and discussion going on, it seems like the class flies by. Alisha and I try to set aside the last five to ten minutes for a class discussion. Each day the students write an answer to the key question as a kind of "exit slip" for the day. Having the students write down answers helps bring them back around to our focus question. We give as many students time to share as we can, and help bridge together their ideas to make sure we've really answered the key question.

All in all, I think this week's lesson was successful. The students were happy to adopt the caterpillars into their classroom, and hopefully the caterpillars will thrive in their new home.

Week 2

This week Alisha and I taught our second science lesson. I definitely felt better prepared and less nervous than week one. Although our lesson this week wasn't as interactive as the Mystery Bag, it was still hands on and I think the class had a good time.

One of our focuses this week was starting the lesson off with a strong hook to engage the students. We focused on the fact that the caterpillars will be arriving next week, and because Alisha and I won't be there every day, we will need the students to be good observers. This made the lesson more relevant to them, because soon they will be hosting the caterpillars in their classroom. Hopefully this motivated them to learn to use the hand lens properly and to think about the different parts of the caterpillar. It definitely opened the door to a lot of stories and ideas about caterpillars, which was great.

Another important part of teaching is managing materials. A lot of this happened before we even got to the classroom. Last week, Alisha and I planned exactly what we would need and made sure we had plenty of supplies for everyone. When we got into the classroom we had a few minutes to lay everything out on a table in the order in which we would need them. We never had to dig around to find what we needed, so we didn't have to waste any class time. It was nice to have two of us coteaching the lesson so we could hand out materials more quickly and keep the lesson moving.

Finally, we really thought about how our lesson related to the state science frameworks. The frameworks are a great resource for lesson planning, because they guide you to what students should be learning at each grade level. Another reason it is important to keep the frameworks in mind is because there are so many lesson plans available online or through educational companies. It might be tempting to just follow along with the plan as it is. However, if the lesson doesn't fit with the frameworks, it might not be the best use of class time. It may be possible to just alter lessons a little bit to make them fit with the frameworks better.

All in all, I think we had a good week two! Next week we'll introduce the caterpillars to the class... just in time for Halloween. Scary!

What's in the bag? A fun science lesson!

Yesterday was our first science lesson with the second graders. Although I was very nervous going in, I had a lot of fun and I can't wait to go back next time!

Alisha and I carefully planned our Mystery Bag lesson well ahead of time and made sure we had all of our materials and handouts ready to go. We checked with the classroom teacher to get her input and made some minor but important changes based on her feedback. We thought about what we wanted to say and who would lead different parts of the lesson, so we never had a moment where we were standing in front of the class with blank looks on our faces. I think we were able to adjust our plans as the lesson went on too, adding a few minutes here or cutting something a little short there to keep things flowing. The result was- the kids loved it! Their screaming was my biggest clue. They could barely contain themselves when they finally got to open the bag and see what was inside. Although the noise level might have been more playground appropriate than classroom appropriate, everything they were chattering about was directly related to their observations and the lesson.

One of our major focuses was how to make observations safely. We couldn't have asked for better kids. It felt a little bit like someone planted some little science geniuses in our class. For every sense, they had serious input about what might be unsafe. They brought up ideas like "if you smell something it might be poisonous and hurt your nose," and "an experiment might have an explosion and then you would never be able to hear ever again." I tried to acknowledge their input while reassuring them that we would not be doing anything that would permanently damage them in any way. One part of the feedback that we got on our lesson was that although the kids all practiced the wafting technique, some of them went ahead and took a big smell of the bag without wafting. We will definitely make sure to keep reminding them of safety throughout the unit.

Finally, I know this lesson wouldn't have been as fun or successful without my coteacher Alisha, aka the other Ms S. Working together we came up with a plan that I wouldn't have been able to pull off on my own. It was really nice to know someone had my back in case I couldn't come up with a word or lost my train of thought. Alisha took on the lesson intro which I am very grateful for, because it gave me a few minutes to get settled before jumping in. For our first experience working with a full class of second graders, it's nice to have two sets of eyes and two people to circulate and answer questions and check in with different groups. I'm glad to have Alisha for a partner!

Next week we'll start talking about caterpillars with the class. Hopefully the idea of having some long-term classroom guests will keep the kids excited about what's coming up next!

T Minus Ten Days!

In just a little over a week, my co-teacher and I are going to walk into a room full of second graders and teach them science. Seriously. We're being kicked out of the nest. After meeting the class this week, I am very excited about the next couple weeks. And also a little nervous.

First, the good part. I think that I am going to have a great time working with these students. We are planning to do lots of fun, hands-on activities. Every student is going to get their own caterpillar to observe for a few weeks to see what happens... don't wreck the surprise ending! This class has a lot of very smart kids in it who will be ready to jump into science. They were tossing around terms like "chlorophyll" during story time last week. I know they'll be able to get into this unit. I am also excited to teach this class because they haven't had any science yet this year. I think they will have fun with it.

There is also a little kid part of me that's really eager to do this science kit because I have never done this experiment myself. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens to our little caterpillar friends!

Although I am mainly excited to get going, part of me is nervous about the coming weeks too. I have done some tutoring and worked with small groups of students, but I have never stood in front of an elementary school class with all eyes (hopefully) on me and tried to teach a full lesson. I'm big on planning which I think will be beneficial. The flip side of that is that I don't always like surprises or having to improvise, which I'm sure will happen on a weekly basis. There are so many what-ifs to think about. What if the kids get bored? What if we finish 10 minutes early with nothing else planned? What if all the caterpillars die? What if the lesson goes off the tracks? What if I lose control of the class and there are kids and caterpillars going every which way?

I think that most of my concerns are shared by a lot of new teachers. They are the things that probably get easier with time. I'm sure that planning, knowing your students, and managing the class all require practice. Hopefully none of these will be big issues because as I said before, I am really excited about the science part of teaching science. I think it's going to be a good 7 weeks!

Let's Make a Plan!

Lesson planning is such an important part of a teacher's job. Carefully planned lessons can really benefit both teachers and students.

We all know that writing is an important task for students. It helps their communication skills, but beyond that it also helps them to focus and develop their ideas. It's the same for teachers! Writing a lesson plan can help us to really think about our goals for the day. If we reflect on those objectives it's more likely that we're planning meaningful experiences for our students instead of just filling up the day with activities.

Planning lessons can also help us to stay organized. In the middle of a dynamic classroom, it might be easy to lose sight of our goal for the day. With a lesson plan we have a road map that can help us to get back on the right track. It can also serve as a quick last minute checklist to make sure we have all of our supplies- that way we won't be standing in front of 20 seven-year-olds who are ready to see a volcano explode and realize we forgot the vinegar at home...

There are a lot of important parts of an elementary science lesson plan, but two that stand out to me are safety considerations and assessment tools.

First, safety considerations. It's easy to take some basic safety rules for granted as adults, but for kids these ideas may not be so obvious. In the last few weeks I've seen students try to taste their glue sticks on the sly and one particularly enterprising boy try to add some holes to his shirt with a pair of scissors- and this was during a reading lesson! In science, we do a lot of hands-on work with different materials, chemicals, and even living organisms. It's really important that we think about our lessons from a safety point of view and keep reviewing safety procedures with our students.

The second piece is assessment. Maybe I planned the best science lesson in the world, but how will I know if my students really learned from it unless I plan some good assessment too? There are a lot of ways to assess kids (observing them, using a checklist, having a discussion, asking them to do a little writing, etc.). For each of our major objectives, we need to make sure we have a way to see how our students are doing. Using assessment also helps us to revamp our lessons when we need to and to see what we need to go over again tomorrow in a different way. Assessment should inform our teaching decisions.

So make a plan!

A Great Science Resource

Today I have been looking around the National Geographic website, and I want to share it as a great resource for science teachers!

There is a lot of great information on this website. In the Education section, there are resources to help plan lessons around different themes like "Summer Learning." You can find ideas for teaching about beach ecosystems, summer weather events like hurricanes or thunderstorms, and links to information about the night sky all clustered together. You can also create maps of ocean currents or tectonic plates.

National Geographic has a lot of social studies information too, so if you want to create some interdisciplinary lessons this is a good place to start!

The other great thing about this site is that there is a whole Kids' Section where your students can explore science topics on their own. There are great videos about all kinds of animals, and on the Fun Stuff: Science page there are some experiments that kids can try by themselves.

Between the education resources for teachers and the fun activities for kids, I think this site can really be a useful tool!

My Science Story

If you asked me to describe myself, "scientist" is not one of the first words I'd use. It probably wouldn't even make the list. I never would have claimed science as a favorite subject in school. However, I think that if I expand my definitions of "science" and "scientist" I might change my mind. So, I gave this blog an optimistic name (plus I do think science is awesome!) and I have made it a goal to come to think of myself as a scientist by the end of this semester.

I actually don't remember much about science in elementary school. I remember being good at measuring liquids (because I put the measuring cup on a level surface) and good at writing middle school lab reports (because I used the phrase "and/or") but I don't remember being really excited about science.

In college, I was a psychology major. I was suprised to realize that my psych classes counted towards science requirements- I really thought "science" was what my chem major roommate was doing, not what we did in psych. We were even relegated to the basement of the science building.

When I think about it, though, part of what I loved about psychology was the science aspect of it. I liked creating experiments and working in the psych lab. I liked trying to test hypotheses and figuring out the "why" of things. In addition to psych, I have always really liked nature and being outdoors. I think this could be a part of science, too. Going hiking, you can't help but think about how long the trees have been around and how the mountains came to be. I'll call my mom to come outside and see the flock of wild turkeys crossing our street, and marvel at how the little babies have grown into big turkeys now (and what weird noises they make!).

So when I think about these things, I realize that there might be a scientist inside of me. I'm looking forward to going back to elementary school science this semester to redefine how I think of science and to think about ways to make science memorable and meaningful for my students!