Family Science Night

Two weeks ago I took part in the Family Science night at our school. I was fortunate enough to teach a 30 minute segment as a part of the science night experience. Students, parents and guardians from each grade 5th, 6th, 7th & 8th showed up to participate in some exciting science activities. The event started with opening activities where students played with tuning forks, created their own bottle of ethanol and did other crazy things that involved blowing up pop bottles! After the opening activities students, parents and guardians were split up to go to my activity (balloon rockets) or the other interns (bridge buidling) activity. Both the other intern and I planned 30 minute activities for our respective groups. After 30 minutes, the groups would switch and we would go through our lesson again. My activity involved students making balloon rockets. Students and parents were to use two chairs, string, straw and a balloon to construct a rocket that would travel on the string. The point of the activity was to measure the speed of the rocket. Students and parents had a blast and so did I. One thing that was really tough during my activities was controlling everyone. Having balloons, string and the "word" rocket in your lesson and you are bound for some hyper children and some parents! If you think teaching 27 students is tough, try 80 and be thankful you only have 27. I thought crowd control would be easy since parents would be there, sorry to say, it wasn't. I learned my lesson, but I had a great time and I hope I have some kind of family event liek this in my future school!

MSU Technology Conference

This Saturday was the 26th annual College of Education Technology Conference at MSU. Getting up early on a Saturday wasn't my favorite thing to do, but this conference was definitely worth the early wake-up. I learned about many innovative technology resources for for use in the classroom. It was really exciting to see all of the enthusiastic teachers come together to learn about things that will help make education even more meaningful for our students. I was bombarded with tons of helpful websites that I will be posting and using in the near future. One of the things I really want to utilize is Google Earth. I sat through an interesting workshop on "Lit Trips". Lit Trips use Google Earth to visually show students the path of events in books or anything else you can think of (where you have lived, where you are going for spring break, etc.) Look forward to the link section on this blog to be extensively longer in the near future, what a good/useful day!

Literature Circles

Our class has been working in literature circles the past week or so. In lit circles, students gather together to discuss a piece of literature. This is how our circles have worked so far...

The students are split into 4 groups and meet with their group 2-3 times a week. Each day before the meeting students have 40-50 minutes to read their assigned chapters and complete their assigned role. Each group member has a specific role they must fulfill during the meeting. Students have the opportunity to fulfill a new role each meeting. The roles are as follows; discussion director, checker, illustrator, summarizer, connector, literary luminary, and vocab enricher.


So far, meetings have been extremely successful and that may be partly due to the amount of practice each student has had with each role. I prepared lessons for each role that provided students the opportunity to ask questions and understand their expectations for each role. Literature circles are completely student driven and all responsibility is on each student to complete their assignment.

The hardest part about lit circles is managing all of them at once. I can only be in one place at one time. I try to spread myself out and get to every group, but sometimes that doesn't always happen. I often focus my attention on those groups that are off task or are struggling to work together and not spending enough time with the groups that seem to be having amazing discussions. I am thinking that we will hold an "online" lit circle by having each student blog about their role.

Marble Mania

Over the past few days our 5th graders have been working diligently on their marble science projects. Students had been learning about momentum, speed, velocity and distance. This project (all credit is given to Ms. M who came up with and taught the lesson) was intended to get students thinking about ways they could maximize a few of these things (distance, and speed) to come up with the slowest moving marble time.

Students were:
Paired with a partner
Given a piece of cardboard
and given plenty of supplies to be as creative as they wanted to be

The goal of the project was to create a maize or path for the marble on your piece of cardboard that would produce the slowest travel time for the marble to make it end to end. Students had to decide where to start their marble, what to use to get it moving, what obstacles to slow the marble down, etc. There are two projects I happened to capture on my computer and I have attached them here. I was really impressed with the outcome of everyone's project. The fastest time ended up being 13 seconds!

Teaching my units so far...

Has been a blast! I have learned a lot and have gotten much more comfortable each day in front of the classroom. One thing I learned from teaching my unit plans is that being prepared is crucial in the success of your lesson. I crashed and burned teaching a lesson because I was unprepared. This particular lesson was a math lesson, one that covered a topic I thought I knew a lot about, which I did, but one that I couldn't explain simply. I may understand something in my head, but sometimes it is hard for me to blurt that out in a way so that my students understand it. If I am prepared this lack of explanation and simplicity does not happen.

After the "crashed" lesson I went back the next day and tried to build on what I was unclear on the day before. I was more direct and clear on what I wanted to do and what I expected each student to be able to do and things went a lot smoother.

Students have been struggling with rounding too and its been frustrating to teach, but today I have finally reached everyone (or at least a majority I hope!) Each day we review the day before using warm-up questions and through discussion. I saw a few light bulbs clicking today and I think my instruction is getting clearer and more concise.

So far, I have learned that I need to make my objectives and goals for the lessons I teach clear and simple for everyone to understand. Never assume a student knows how to do something! (I taught my class how to use a dictionary the other day and it really made me happy when one student didn't know what a word meant during a language arts assignment and used the dictionary in the room to find the definition. Little victories make the days go by...)