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!