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.