Teaching the Lesson

This past week was an interesting with science because I was able to teach my lesson plan to my students. I did my lesson on sound, and I was surprised by some of the results. Many of the students had a great time using the sound systems, which is something that I knew going into the lesson because many of the students can get off-task very easily and hands-on activities are a great way to keep them involved in the lesson. Behavior management has always been a problem that I have had in this classroom because the students know that I am not “the” teacher as my CT is. Because of this, they know they have a little more freedom to goof off when he is not always around. However, I believe that I have gotten better at it as the year has gone, even though there is still plenty of room for improvement. Anyway, the students experimented with the systems in a productive way, but I had to continually remind them that they need to write their evidence in their science journals. This is something that took a little more effort because the students continuously wanted to play with the sound systems. The discussion also went very well because of the level of real world experiences the students were able to bring to the conversation. Many different students were dying to tell their own little stories, and I tried to relate each one to what we were learning so this learning opportunity was not wasted. Sometimes some of the students just wanted to tell their story, so I had to ask them a question or comment further so that a connection was made between the comment and the material that we were covering in the lesson. I think that this lesson was a productive one and is something that I could have continued on with in the activity sequence. It can definitely be built upon, and the type of activity that I did with them is a great way of reaching the students on their level instead of lecturing.