Our lesson was taught on Thursday,
October 16th. The overview of our lesson was to review what the
previous group taught the students about living and nonliving things, sing a
song about the topic, do an interactive SMART Board activity, ask the students
about the living characteristics, and then do a small group activity with the
students. We were able to complete all the activities in the allotted time. I
would say that the lesson went well overall, only a few hiccups that didn’t
affect the lesson as a whole.
The strengths of the lesson were the
SMART Board activity and the sorting card activity. I was surprised at how well
the SMART Board activity went since these students sometimes struggle with
large group activities on the carpet. The students were able to use the
“special pointer” to reach the things on the board. I think that this motivated
the students to participate and they were able to “play” on the board. Majority
of the students were able to get a turn moving an object to the living or
nonliving category. Something that definitely helped this activity move
smoothly was that we allow the students to pick someone that they wanted as
long as they were sitting with a “ready body”. As soon as we said that, the
students were more attentive and less fidgety. The rest of the activity went
very smooth.
The other strength of the lesson was the
card sorting activity that took place at the student’s tables in small groups.
The other teachers in the room were a large help in this activity. The students
were to flip picture cards over and decipher if the object in the picture was a
living or nonliving thing. During this activity we also assessed if the
students understood the difference between living and nonliving things. This
activity went so well because we were able to have two teachers at each table
of 4 or 5 students. This helped us to manage the students that were easily
distracted and keep the other students on task at the same time. At the table I
was working with, the students seemed to understand the difference between
living and nonliving. This was encouraging because I felt the students
understood the lesson that was taught. They were able to give reasons why each
object was living or nonliving based on the three criteria that we spoke about
(it eats, breathes, and grows). I felt
that both activities went so well because both Taylor and myself have good
classroom management strategies.
Although I felt our lesson went very well
overall, there are still areas that could have been improved. One of the areas that
I felt we could have done better on was the beginning of the lesson. While we
were reviewing we kind of rushed through it. I felt we could of taken the
beginning of our lesson a little bit slower and gotten more interaction with the
students this way. The students remembered the previous weeks lesson that was
taught by the other teachers and were able to produce the three criteria of a
living thing. This definitely aided our lesson because if the students wouldn’t
of remember we would have had to take extra time to talk more about it before
moving on. Something we could have done to improve the beginning of our lesson
would have been to slow down and review a little bit more before jumping into
our first activity. This would of have helped because it would of allowed us a
better opportunity to see which students remembered and which did not.
In general I felt that the students were
interested and motivated to participate in the activities. During large group
they showed this because a lot of the students raised their hands when
questions were being asked and when they wanted to be called on to do the
activity on the board. During small group instruction the students showed their
motivation and interest when they wanted multiple turns while doing the
activity. Since the students did so well when using their prior knowledge and
the new knowledge with this topic, I felt that they were confident enough in
the information that they wanted to participate so much.
During the lesson I felt that Taylor and
myself were very knowledgeable on the content of our lesson. We knew exactly
how we wanted to conduct the lesson and what were going to do for it. We also
knew all the background information about classifying living and nonliving
things. We did plenty of research when looking for ideas and activities for our
lesson that we learned even more than we did before writing the lesson and
conducting it. During the lesson I felt we were pretty organized. As I said
before, we could have slowed down in the beginning and that would of made us
even more organized. The beginning of the lesson was hectic because we had to
set up the SMART Board and get the students focused right away. This was
probably the most unorganized part of our lesson because it was the beginning.
Overall, the lesson had pretty good organization.
As I have stated throughout this
reflection, the students seemed to understand the content very well. They were
able to recall prior knowledge from the previous groups lesson on living and nonliving
things. Some of the students struggled with remembered but we were able to help
them remember while reviewing. Throughout the lesson I felt that the students
were building more knowledge on this topic. My whole small group at the end of
the lesson was able to list the three criteria to classify an object as a
living thing. Even though some students
would get their words mixed up like instead of eat they would say taste because
that was something we had previously taught them about senses, they were able
to get the general idea. Some of the students knew the three reasons very well
to the point where I did not have to ask them why it was living because they
would just say the reasons right after flipping over the picture card. I felt that the students did a great job
throughout the lesson producing the information that we were looking for from
them. The students also met both the objective throughout the lesson. They were
able to sort living and nonliving things into the correct category, and answer
questions about living and nonliving things with prompting for a teacher. As a
whole, I felt that this kindergarten lesson went very well and was very
organized.
website for more information on teaching living and nonliving: http://www.kindergartenkindergarten.com/2012/03/a-science-mini-unit-living-and-non-living.html
EXCEEDS: Over the required word count and included a webpage.
