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!