Observations 1,2, and 3

Ok, so this is me trying frantically to catch up. So, although these posts are very very late (except for #3 which is mostly on time), I did write down the observations while I was in class, so it is mostly a matter of copying.... thanks Mary, for reminding me about this blogger thing :)

Observation #1 (22 February 2007):

As I entered the class for the first time in a few months, I found myself reminded that the SOLs are coming up for these students. The instructions the teacher has written on the board for the students direct them to put away their belongings and to begin studying their SOL booklets. Ms. K usually has some kind of quiet, independent activity for the students to complete when they first arrive, while they wait for morning announcements and she completes morning tasks, such as organizing and handing out the students' BC folders, which they are to take home to their parents. Apparently there have been problems with students not being responsible with their folders, and Ms. K gives the students a brief lecture about the need to take responsibility for their assignments. She is pretty strict with them, which is interesting, because I think when I was in elementary school my teachers were pretty lenient, but maybe I was just really careful about doing all of the assignments.

Class begins with a review about soil. Ms. K asks students to contribute the things they remember from prior lessons. She directs the conversation and helps to clarify when students' statements are unclear. She writes things on the board as students say them.

Today they are talking about weathering, which also seems to be review for them. After discussing it pretty briefly as a class, they are to complete an activity meant to simulate weathering. Ms. K hands out sugar cubes and plastic easter eggs to each group of students. For activities like this, the arrangement of the classroom is ideal (students desks are clustered into groups of 4 and 5). The students are to make observations about the sugar cube, then place it inside the egg and shake it. Each student in the cluster gets two minutes to shake the egg, and after each person in the groups has gotten a turn, they open the eggs and make observations about the sugar cube after the "weathering" process. It was cool because I think the students could see a couple of things. First of all, none of the sugar cubes were as "weathered" as the students had expected. They originally thought their cubes would be broken into tiny pieces by the end of the activity, but even the most weathered cube was only beginning to get round at the edges. I think this helped to emphasize that it takes a very long time for the weathering process to occur. the other thing I think this activity was good for was to help kids visually see the change in rocks due to weathering, which Ms. K reinforced by passing around real rocks to the students, both weathered and unweathered, so that the students could see that the weathered rocks were round, like their sugar cubes, while the unweathered rocks still had sharp or jagged edges.
Another thing I liked about this activity is that all of the children were engaged in it. Even Student I, who rarely pays any attention at all during class. I wonder about him. He seems like a smart kid, but he never does ANYTHING in class and hardly ever pays attention. Anyway, the reason that makes me curious is that this is supposed to be the advanced science class. I wonder if he performs well even though he doesn't pay attention, or if maybe his teachers just saw potential, or if maybe his mom wanted him to be in this class. I should ask Ms. K about that.
Anyway, after shaking the egg and observing the sugar cube, students were to record their observations on a worksheet, and then Ms. K asked them to fill in a flow chart of what a rock might look like over millions of years as the weathering process occurs, based on today's lesson and on what they'd learned the day before.
Overall I think this was a good lesson, because it definitely helped to illustrate the important concepts and it got the students engaged. I was glad Ms. K emphasized the length of time that the weathering process takes, because I think that point can be easily missed, and it is hard to convey that image to elementary schoolers who have only lived 8 or 9 years.
It was nice to be back in our classroom, and it was nice to see how excited some of the kids were to see us. By third grade, kids tend to be less affectionate, but it was clear by the expressions on their faces and their eager waves that they were excited to see us. :)


Observation #2 (1 March 2007):

Today the kids come in as usual and work quietly at their desks; however, immediately after the morning announcements there is a fire drill, and the whole class lines up and walks out to the parking lot, where Ms. K calls roll, and then we all trek back in, along with the rest of the school. Ms. K keeps apologizing that today's lesson is going to be really boring-- the class went on a big field trip the day before, and she was exhausted by the end of the day. I can definitely see how that might happen-- I have felt exhausted after teaching a single lesson! Sometimes I wonder how teachers do it all day every day. I hope it gets easier. Anyway, the lesson wasn't bad, just not as hands on as usual. The kids read as a class out of the science book, with Ms. K calling on one student at a time to read out loud. She had to ask student I to take a comic book out of his book, which I had honestly never seen tried outside of cheesy TV shows! I had no idea that kids actually tried it. Student M was obviously not following along, and when she called on him he got flustered and couldn't find his place, which reminded me of myself during choral reading when I was in elementary school. I hated waiting for the other kids to read. Anyway, he straightened right up after that. Ms. K handled it really well-- she moved on to the next student and told him she'd come back to him, so he had an incentive to get to the right spot. I had a teacher once who wrote my name on the board for not following along, and it ended with her having to take me out of the classroom to get me to stop crying. Anyway, to get back on topic, Ms. K's approach seemed to work well.
After reading, the students each created their own "Soil Scroll," which consisted of pictures of the three layers of soil (topsoil, subsoil, and bedrock) that the students colored in, and then a description of each of the three layers. These four parts were stapled together in a long column like a scroll, and then the students were supposed to cut out pictures of the animals that inhabit each of the three levels and place them in the appropriate places on the scroll.
Although the lesson was not as interactive as Ms. K's lessons normally are, it seemed to address the subject matter really well. And it helped the kids to rethink and to apply the information they were learning to create the scrolls. I wonder if there is a better way to do choral reading, or a way to get around it? The information from the book was relevant to the lesson, but to be honect even I wasn't paying attention to what the students were reading, although it may have been partly because I didn't have the book in front of me. The students were allowed to refer to the book as the created their soil scrolls, so it wasn't essential that they pay attention to the reading. I don't know..... I mean, I guess it's important for the class to go through the material together, and I am definitely a fan of incorporating reading in the other subject areas, but I can't blame the students for not paying much attention. Textbooks can be so dry.


Observation #3 (7 March 2007):

Today when the kids came in their warm-up activity was to read and hi-light a short passage about Thurgood Marshall. After announcements are over, the class discusses the passage. The kids seem to be really focused on the physical building of the Supreme Court, and not on the institution, which was supposed to be the main point of the story, since the class had apparently discussed the branches of government recently. I didn't feel like Ms. K really clarified that in addition to being a building, the Supreme Court is an institution. But she may not have picked up on it-- sometimes it is easier to notice as a passive observer, especially if you just intended the lesson to be a quick review and you have other things to teach and the SOLs are coming up and you have 2 student teachers who are also interrupting your schedule. Seriously, the idea of being a teacher stresses me out sometimes. Anyway, I was also wondering if the students' difficulty distinguishing between the institution and the place might be more of a developmental level thing. Like maybe that concept is just hard for students to grasp at this age? Oh yeah, and another thing I forgot to mention about today-- Ms. K is feeling really sick and while she is trying to teach, the office is in the process of tracking down a substitute for her, but she can't leave until they do. So that is probably the main reason she didn't pick up on the Supreme Court thing.
Anyway, after that, Ms. K has the students sit on the floor on a rug while she reads "From Seed to Plant" by Gail Gibbons, who also wrote another information book that was in our text set for EDIS 530A, about how a house is built. She does a good job of stopping to discuss things in the book with the students, which I think helps keep them involved in what she is reading, although not everyone is paying attention. After she reads the book out loud, she introduces the activity for the day, which is to begin growing bean plants, an activity which will go on for a few weeks, and will involve the students making observations over that time period about what is happening to their plants. Ms. K gives everyone a paper towel and a baggie, and while my partner and I walk around and label the baggies with the students' names, the students get their paper towels damp and get their lima beans from Ms. K. She asks them questions throughout the process, and it becomes clear that they know that their seeds need sunlight to grow, and that they know that the roots are the first part to grow, though it is unclear how much they understand about the process.
After all the baggies had been taped to the window in the classroom (Ms. K put hers in the closet, just to see what happens :) ), my partner and I gave our preassessment about the explorers unit we're going to teach. Our original was a contructed response assessment, with short-answer questions on the front and a space on the back to write anything else they know about explorers; however, when we showed it to Ms. K, she suggested that her preassessments are usually multiple choice so that the students can guess if they don't know. I guess I understand the reason behind that. It can be unsettling to be unable to write an answer on an assessment, even when you knwo it's not graded. But my problem with that is that if students are guessing the correct answers, then we are not really getting an accurate picture of what they know. We changed it anyway, though, since we are guests in Ms. K's classroom. After giving the preassessment, it was pretty obvious that the students did not know much about explorers, except that Christopher Columbus was the first European to discover America and that Jamestown was the first permanent European settlement. So I guess it wasn't such a big deal that we changed it, since the students were pretty uninformed about the subject across the board, which means that our lessons will basically be starting from square one. And the planning begins..............