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!!