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.