Our Last Lesson Was AMAZING!!

YES! This small token means SO MUCH!!!

Thank you so much to Room 21!!!

This past Monday was our final rocks and minerals lesson. L and I were really sad to be leaving. Before the lesson L kept saying, “I’m going to miss our kids!” and I agreed. We would both miss working with this wonderful group of kids and our 2 great teachers.

L organized some presents (on behalf of both of us—thanks!!!!) and they were so appreciative. We weren’t expecting anything in return, so after our prep time at the beginning of the lesson we were both taken off guard when they presented us with 2 handmade gifts! First, we received our own pet rocks, which were modeled after us and in fancy velvet cases! Second, we got an anthology of each student’s How To Be A Rock poems (which are AMAZING—I’ll see if I can post some of them by whiting out the names). The Anthology also had several pages of personal notes to us from each student and teacher. It was SO GREAT to be honored in that way—and we weren’t expecting anything like that at all!

So, after that auspicious beginning, we knew our final lesson would unfold in an encouraging way!

Our science question for the lesson was “How does the surface of each of the 12 minerals look when light is shined on it?”

The lesson entailed performing a field test to ascertain each mineral’s luster. So our challenge lay in first explaining what luster exactly is (simply the way light shines off the surface of a rock, mineral or crystal) and how to describe it. We used foil, plastic, glass and an eraser to demonstrate metallic, waxy, glassy and dull luster. We also brainstormed other words to describe the mineral’s luster and then we had the students get all their materials and begin their field tests.

We closed up the lesson with discussion on some of the discrepancies that student s found regarding their quartz specimens (some were foggy or waxy on the bottom, but glassy on top) and pyrite (some pyrite samples were not super metallic, you had to actually shine the light in a very specific way to catch it). Finally, we thanked everyone profusely…it was definitely a great lesson!

Overall impression of teaching the rocks and minerals science unit was excellent! I really enjoyed the opportunities to both interact with students while improving my content knowledge. I think it was a win-win situation since the teachers and students we worked with also seemed to really enjoy it.

What did you learn about teaching science?

Preparation of both supplies, lesson plan (including science process skills and science question) beforehand is essential! I learned that time management is a crucial element and that as a teacher I need to actively limit the questions I take from students in order to keep the class on track and progressing in a timely manner.

The weekly feedback that L and I received was very helpful and also helped encourage us, since sometimes we felt a bit discouraged after a lesson if we knew we made mistakes (fortunately there were less of the discouraging times). The feedback was very specific and always helped us improve the next lesson.

Our classroom teacher was wonderful! She had a lot of enthusiasm about science and working with her students in general. She also did not hesitate to offer L and I constructive criticism and feedback (sometimes while we were doing our lesson—which took a bit of getting used to, but in retrospect really helped us learn about best practices!). I always appreciate an opportunity to work hands on, since there’s so much that you learn while actually doing something.

My content knowledge on the rock cycle, rocks and minerals and field tests improved massively. Before this lesson I didn’t know much about rocks and minerals. As a result of fielding a multitude of astute questions (it felt like nearly every lesson I faced a barrage of intensely inquisitive and intelligent questions from these fourth graders!) I was forced to seriously brush up on my earth science knowledge. This proved to be an opportunity which I really appreciated and enjoyed!

As L and I taught lessons on rocks and minerals I learned a lot about science process skills. First, I had an opportunity to become familiar with each of the process skills. Before teaching the rocks and minerals unit I only had a basic theoretical understanding of science process skills. After teaching these lessons I have a more developed sense of how utilizing each of the science process skills will play out in a classroom with students. I also learned that each lesson should only focus on one or two, that way students have an opportunity to perfect each process skill. Most people intuit that when we seek to understand our world we ask questions and make observations. Communicating our observations and making predictions dovetail into the observations we make about the world around us. I loved teaching science to elementary students because they were so enthusiastic about engaging in all of these skills. As a result of this enthusiasm it was a pleasure to work with these students—on several occasions I thought to myself how fortunate I was to be working with these wonderful individuals!

My level of confidence has most definitely increased as a result of this opportunity. As L and I closed our final lesson a couple days ago there was a huge difference in both our comfort levels—we were so much less nervous and confident. We had a great relationship with Ms. B and Ms. F and we knew nearly all of the student’s names (or at least could see the name tags on their desks).

I found the blogging useful, but I also found it hard to write each week. I know I will use a blog when I teach since I think it is a fantastic way to communicate with students. I know that it will be a great way for me to post additional information, specific details that may need reiterating as well as provide additional information for parents as well. I think maintaining an open forum will be advantageous since I will only have to answer questions once by posting and then others can refer to that information. (I have firsthand experience of how frustrating it can be to answer the same question more than once, and a blog is a great way to ameliorate that problem).

I think this project went really well and would recommend doing it again. Any win-win situation like this should continue as long as it benefits all parties.

Suggestions for doing this again: provide the science workbooks and all of the lesson plans a couple weeks ahead of the first lesson plan. I found it difficult to get a feel for the broad context of the lesson because I couldn’t read the final lessons—I know I could’ve been more proactive about finding that information, but in an ideal world each student would have access to it from the get go. Other than that I felt like it was really well done. I heartily recommend the experience for future elementary education graduate students!

Lesson 6: This mineral smells like….wet cement, magma, popcorn, rotten eggs!

(***This is a belated blog post and appears out of order with other posts)

Lesson 6 was on observing and describing each mineral’s appearance, texture and smell.

We had a few challenges with materials management for this lesson since we were working with water; we needed vessels and lots of paper towels. Neither of those items were in the rocks and minerals box or the classroom, but I was able to get a large roll of paper towels from the supply closet while Ms. B got some plastic cups. We gave each student several pieces of paper towel, but in retrospect I think we should’ve have given them more. I would’ve also given them less water in their vessels, stressing to them repeatedly to only use a *very small* amount. While I made a large mineral profile sheet Leah put our agenda, science question and lesson goal as well as process skills up on the white board.

During the first part of this lesson we focused on modeling exactly what we wanted the students to do, reminding them to consider the science question of “What do each of the 12 mineral specimens look like, feel like and smell like?” while conducting their field tests. I also did my best to use accessible vocabulary while explaining the relationship between rocks and minerals. We also spoke specifically about sulfur and feldspar.

Lastly, before we moved on to the field tests Leah passed out vocabulary lists to each student. As each student looked the list over we explained that they would have a quiz later that week, but they needn’t worry since they knew every word on the list based on our previous presentations. (We were so pleased to hear that each student scored a 100% on the quiz!!!)

I explained how to conduct field tests to the students and then the class paired off to conduct field experiments. The experimentation went well. Again, I felt like it took us a long time to get around to letting them do the hands-on activities and although we made a vow last time, it was still very difficult to halt the many questions we received while moving through several additional goals. We also encountered some difficulty in gently explaining the difference between subjective and objective observations, since as we conducted a class dialogue on observations some students shared some rather subjective observations, such as our mineral A smelled like magma or our mineral F smelled like popcorn. Another student remarked that it was impossible to know what magma smelled like and we tried our best to correct this misconception while still encouraging the student. In retrospect, it was a classic teachable moment!

Lesson 6 was the best lesson yet, since Leah, and I working really well together. We both began to get a lot more confident presenting in the class while being observed, working with Ms. B (we both grew accustomed to her style—we actually began to really appreciate her candid feedback and additional comments).