Butterfly Fun!!

For the first half of our lesson the kids were the most excited/rambunctious we have seen them yet; but all in all I would have to say that our lesson went well. We did much better this week with time management and we were able to complete all of the activities that we had intended to without running over into recess or specials.  We were also able to incorporate another short video (about the emerging butterfly) into our lesson this week which the children love and constantly ask us to show more of. Unfortunately with the way the class is designed, it is very hard to find a wall to project a video onto; as a result, we have the students sit in a close semi-circle around a laptop. Although the kids aren’t phased by it, their close proximity to each other tends to make them a little more chatty than usual which tends to make it more challenging for us to explain what is going on and to have the students watch for certain things. From our helpful feedback from our lesson, we realize that if we show this video or another like it in the future, it would be helpful to show the movie twice and to pose questions for the students to watch for previous to watching the video.

We also took a risk this week and asked the students to write about two things they saw in the video. This can be challenging for young students because they have to think back about what they say and then explain this in writing. As a whole, the class is very slow at writing and often needs to be further prompted to complete writing tasks. In past weeks we have written the beginning of sentences (or cloze sentences) on the board for them and had them complete the sentence based on their observations. For example, one week we wrote “I see __________ head capsules” on the board to help prompt students to write about the head capsules which we were learning about. We also wrote something like “My caterpillar looks like it is_____________” . For this lesson however, we left it open to the students to see what they could come up with on their own. We made sure walk around and assist students who appeared to be stuck or struggling with the activity. All in all, however, the students do seem to be doing better with their writing, several of them were able to write complete sentences about what they saw with proper capitalization with very minimal if any assistance. 

Over the weekend, Mia and I created a large 3-D model of a butterfly to help us develop an interactive lesson to teach the students about the different parts of the butterfly. We told the students that the butterfly came in pieces and that we needed their help putting it together by following the clues that were with it. Each group was given 2 pieces (body parts) of the butterfly and had to decide if they thought they had the part that the clue was describing. After we read the clue aloud groups would raise their hands if they believe they had the right piece, if there was more than one group that thought they had the correct piece we would read additional clues to help them decide which piece was correct. After each piece was added we had the students label the body part on their worksheets. The students seemed to really enjoy this part of the lesson and now they have a large 3-D model of a butterfly with labeled body parts hanging in the room to help them remember what they learned this week. We wanted to have the students name the butterfly but we did unfortunately run out of time for that.

Overall, the lesson was a lot of fun and I can’t wait for next week!

           

Chrysalis/Pupa!!

The students were extra excited and anxious during our lesson this week but they still managed to do a great job! Although we tend to introduce lots of new vocabulary each week, this week we seemed to have even more than usual. Since we had so many words to review and so many more new words to teach decided to start our lesson by reviewing words that we presented in our previous lesson before moving on.  I have to admit that I was completely blown away by how much the students remembered. They also did a good job learning the new vocabulary from this week which I felt were rather challenging words and concepts to comprehend. Things like an "exoskeleton" and the process of "molting" can seem very odd and abstract to young children.  To try to make challenging vocabulary more understandable for the students and more fun for them to learn, we decided to create a game using cards and manila folders. We made three cards for each of the seven new words that we taught. One card featured the vocabulary word, the second card featured the definition or a description of the word and the third card featured an image or picture of the word. The object of the game was to have the students match each vocabulary words with it's correct definition and correlating picture. Just having learned these new words most of the groups seemed to do pretty well with the activity; unfortunately, we did ran out of time at the end of our lesson so we will go over all of the words, definitions and pictures with the students next week. We will also have the students add these words to our portable word wall during our review next week.
       The flow of our class went well this week. I would not say that it was our best flowing class but by no means was it bad. As I mentioned before, the students were extra excited to begin with this week and then to boot, this was the first week that we incorporated videos in our lesson. (The kids loved watching the videos and wanted to see more.) As a result the kids became even more excited which became obvious in their transitions from their desks to the circle area and vise versa. This however, was a great learning experience for me and will help me think to remind the students about the expectations we (or the teacher) have regarding good behavior. In future lessons, we will know and be able to keep in mind how excited the students get about videos and will address the expectations that are to upkeep during transitions and viewing periods before making any moves. Even with the students' elevated excitement levels, I would have to say that the lesson went well overall.
     One of the things that we were asked to address in our lesson on Monday was a common misconception that students (people in general) have in relation to caterpillars and chrysalis - or the butterfly life cycle in general. The misconception that we decided would be important to clarify in our lesson is that fact that not all caterpillars form cocoons. The truth is that caterpillars only form a cocoon if it is going to become a moth. Caterpillars that become butterflies form a chrysalis (or pupa). Ironically and rather fittingly, most of the students made comments about the caterpillars forming cocoons which lead us right into our explanation/clarification of the misconception. We took this time to explain to the students that what they  observed  was actually called a chrysalis which is a protective shell that is hard and smooth and explained that a cocoon is actually soft and fuzzy. Most of the students seemed to come in to this lesson with the misconception that all caterpillars created cocoons and seemed to leave the class with a notion that some caterpillars (like theirs) can create a chrysalis instead. I can't what to see how excited the students get over the butterflies!

Caterpillar Excitement!!

      After a long week of waiting and anticipation, our caterpillars were still caterpillars for our lesson on Monday which was great news!! Somehow Mia and I were able to keep the caterpillars a secret from the kids until our lesson this week so the kids were super excited about them! Before letting the students observe that caterpillars however, we first had them guess what our mystery insect. The kids listened to the six clues that we gave them about the "mystery insect" and then came up with several great guesses about the insects the we were explaining. Throughout the beginning of the lesson the students were quietly asking us one-by-one if  was had lives insects (caterpillars) in the room for them. We told them that we would soon find out but we would have to wait just a little while longer. This seemed to really build the students excitement and anticipation.   

       In addition to the caterpillars, there were several other factors that could have impacted the atmosphere of our classroom and could have created a need for effective classroom management strategies: the students had six days off, went back to school for a day and then had another two days off leading up to our lesson; their was a substitute in our classroom and it was the morning after the students celebrated Halloween (went trick or treating). Despite these several factors, however, I felt that the students did a great job focusing and maintaining their attention on the task at hand. There were only a few times in which we were required to use the "1.2.3. All eyes on my" approach. Over the past few weeks we have found that the students respond well to this approach. We also asked the students follow/conduct a few minor motor tasks (physical movements) to regain their attention and to make sure that they were listening. (For example, we asked the students to put both of their hand high in the air if they were done with their journal entries.) Overall, I was very impressed with the way that the students handled themselves and controlled their excitement throughout the lesson. 

        In terms of our actual lesson planning and presentation this week, we quickly realized that we had over planned and created more than the students would be able to complete in the hour. As a result, we decided to improvise as we went along. Although we normally conclude our lesson with a summary and word wall presentation in the circle area of the room, we decided to improvise and skip this portion of our lesson. However, this did not mean that we completely skipped or canned our lesson conclusion we just concluded the lesson in a different way than originally intended. Since we used a K and a W chart to introduce the lesson, we decided to conclude the overall lesson with the L "what we learned" portion of the K-W-L chart. This appeared to be very effective, the students volunteers several things that they had learned from the lesson. (As the teacher, this was great to see and made me feel as though our lesson was successful even though we improvised.)  Where we skipped the word wall activity and the reviewing of the Caterpillar body parts on the large poster board, we realized that this will be a great way to start next weeks lesson.

 The process skill that we incorporated in this week lesson was observation. We asked the students to observe their caterpillars by properly using hand lenses (which we previously taught) and encouraged them to record their observations in their Science Journals by making a drawing and writing at least on description sentence about what they observed. We also left the student with the task of observing their Caterpillars and recording daily detailed observations in their Science Journals. We tried to encourage the students to record as much detail in their observations because we weren't going to be able to see the caterpillars all week and we wanted to know what they did. I am hopeful that this approach was influential to the students and encouraged them to make detailed observations throughout the week. I am very interested to see how/what they did!