First Day!

      Monday was our first day teaching science to the second graders. The kids were absolutely amazing and remained engaged  throughout the entire mystery bag lesson!  I personally feel that my co-teacher and I worked very well together both creating and presenting the lesson as a team and I  am very happy/pleased  with our teamwork. Working together is making this learning experience very enjoyable for me. I feel that it is also teaching more than I would have learned working on my own. Having someone to bounce ideas off of has allowed us to create more creative and effective lessons than we would have designed independently (at least this is true in my case, I cannot speak for my co-teacher).
     In regards to lesson planning, I like the standard lesson plan format that the university has created and feel that planning lessons with this template will help us become stronger lesson planners in the future. Planning our first lesson took us a little while to do but I am hopeful that as we continue to create more and more lessons, the process will become much quicker and easier to do. Also, now that we have had the opportunity to have others review our lesson plan and provide us with feedback has aided us in thinking more critically about lesson planning which I believe will help us drastically with future lessons. (We now know which areas to provide more detail and which areas do not require as much detail.)
      I also like how the science lesson plan incorporates safety considerations. As we know, science experiments and lessons can sometimes get messy and can contain harmful materials As a result, I feel that the safety section of the lesson plan is one of the most important aspects to consider. Our lesson this week did not contain any harmful chemicals or materials but we still had considerations to make. We did not want children attempting to eat or mouth any of the materials in the mystery bags and we didn't want students sticking any objects in their eyes or ears. We also made sure that the  materials that we placed in the mystery bags were things that the students in the class would not be allergic to. Similarly were made sure that we did not put anything sharp or breakable in the bag that could have the students during the "touch" phase of the lesson. Although we made several considerations for safety concerns, we unfortunately encounters one thing that we did not foresee happening, one of the boys in the class was not sure if he poked himself in the eye with the bag or if his eye was just itchy from touching the bag and rubbing his eye. Fortunately, the boy was okay and returned to the class after a quick visit to the nurse and was ready/excited to finish working on the lesson. Aside from this occurrence, the students engaged in the lesson rather safely and the considerations we made appeared to be beneficial. The incident with the boy  is a helpful learning experience for us and will help us make even more effective safety considerations in the future.
Overall, I feel that our first lesson was a success and has instilled an excitement in us as well as the students for our future lessons! I cannot wait for next week!