As this semester as gone on, my CT has pretty much given me the reigns on teaching science and social studies. Most days I teach various other small reading lessons throughout the day and even math as well. We have a very co-teach type of classroom relationship and I think we are both very comfortable with this situation. Even though I have been teaching science now for a while, I haven’t had a formal observation of me teaching science. Since I wanted to get feedback on me teaching as many subjects as possible I decided to sign up for a science observation.

In kindergarten, one topic is often taught for an extended amount of time. I assume this is to build those students foundational prior knowledge because this is the first year of formal schooling. In my teaching science course I learned how important it is to address student misconceptions early on so that they don’t face these at a later date. The misconception that was important to teach in this lesson was that you can only see the moon at night. Throughout teaching this topic we have addressed this, but I made sure to explicitly teach and show them this again so that they don’t have this misconception as they get older. The lesson that I taught was the second to last day that they would be one the topic of day and night. That being said, they have been on this topic for about a week and a half at this point. Since many of the students were pretty familiar with the concept I wanted to do something they hadn’t really done before. I was planning on making a class Venn diagram and then they would have to use that diagram to write about either day or night. However, the day before they had used pictures they made to compare day and night in their writing. Therefore, I didn’t want to be repetitive and have them write sentences again saying the same thing. I thought why not have the students show their knowledge in a different format, an individual Venn diagram. This was something that I hadn’t planned to do, but that’s how teaching goes sometimes. You have to be flexible and plan according to your students, even if that’s changing your plan last minute.

The beginning of my lesson started with a read aloud non-fiction text of day and night. I’m not really sure if it was because the book was boring to them or if it was because there was a stranger in the room, but my students were acting much different than usual during this time. Normally, the students are pretty well engaged in my reading and respond to my questioning well. In this case, one of my students started crying and getting upset, another kept messing with my rocking chair, and it seemed like the majority of the kids were really off topic when I was asking questions. This instance was something that didn’t go as planned. Instead of answering the question, they would tell me “I just wanted to tell you…” then go off on a tangent. Normally, I would tell them they could tell me that later if it didn’t answer the question, but to be honest I didn’t want to get counted off for not allowing a student to speak so I sat through it. I think this may have been because the text was a little boring for them. Next time, I would consider using a myon book to capture their interest through technology with the read-aloud. With the student that kept messing with my chair, I would have had her clip down after the second time of telling her to stop, but again I didn’t want to get counted off for negative punishment. The thing that surprised me was also something that obviously you can never plan for. One of my students started crying, during the read aloud and I didn’t know why. After I was talking with my CT about it, she told me that he had wanted to get water and she told him no so he got really upset and started to cry. When I saw that he was crying during the lesson, I was unsure of how to handle it, so I just ignored it and hoped he would stop. I’m not the best with emotions, so I didn’t know if pointing it out and asking if he was okay would have made it worse or not.

Even though the lesson started off a little rough, I did feel like there were a lot of positives from it. The picture and audio recognition activity that I did with the kids after the read aloud went a lot smoother than the book. I had the students make a sleeping motion with their hands if they saw a picture or heard a sound that was night. If it was a day image or audio, then the students would put both their hands in the air. I think it went so well because it combined fun with motion, whereas the read-aloud may have been a little boring for them because of the content and wording. Additionally, another thing that went well was the Venn diagram. This was the first time that the students did it on their own. Normally, we complete the whole Venn diagram as a class, but since this was one of the last days of teaching night and day, I figured that they had sufficient knowledge about the topic to do it on their own. Almost all of the students filled in their entire Venn diagram with key words that described something they see or do.

There was a student who did well in this lesson with completing the Venn diagram and doing the recognition activity. This student had been struggling with writing her letters together when it’s one word and using spaces between words. You could clearly see her words in the Venn diagram, along with pictures that she drew of them. For differentiation for my struggling students, I used the strategy and lesson structure that my CT and I normally do for writing practice. We normally switch off supporting these students by pulling them back in a small group. Since I was teaching the lesson, she pulled some back and gave them support while completing the Venn diagram. The accommodations I gave for my ELL students was the use of the picture/audio activity. This gave the students the ability to show their knowledge through motion rather than words. According to Edwards, McLaren, Mckeever, Ruddick, and Zabjek “Recent cognitive neuroscientific evidence indicates that movement and gesture are also necessary for optimal cognitive and communicative development” (2011). This is an important piece of literature to remember when teaching kindergarten because they are such young learners and need that movement. Additionally, before the students independently made the Venn diagrams, I modeled how to fill in the graphic organizer appropriately. While modeling the Venn diagram, I drew pictures of the words and sounded out the words as I wrote the letters.

From the prior lessons I’ve done with the students, I’ve sen they were fully capable of knowing that “I can see the sun during the day”, but I wanted to be able to have them combine what they see and what they do during the day and night. Also having the middle portion in the Venn diagram challenges them to think at a more abstract higher level because they are comparing rather than just telling the difference.

Since this was the final day of teaching day and night, and the students did well I would like to do a final assessment to verify that moving to the next concept is best for the students. If after doing this final assessment, and I saw that the students were competent in this section then I would move to the next chapter that covers the constellations and the moon. However, if I saw that a lot of them still had misconceptions and a weak foundational knowledge about the topic, then I would spend an extra day or two teaching day and night in a different way to try and build their learning. This topic is necessary to understand before moving to the next sections, so this is a vital next step that I won’t over look.

References

Edwards, G., McLaren, C., McKeever, P., Ruddick, S., & Zabjek, K. (2011). Kindergarten kids in motion: Rethinking inclusive classroom for optimal learning. Educational & Child Psycology, 28(1), 100-113. Retrieved February 3, 2017.