First Day Teaching 4th Grade!
The day finally came! After only having one week to prepare our unit plan, my fieldwork group and I successfully taught our direct instruction lesson on weather & water! It was a stressful and time consuming week...but we created an awesome and engaging lesson! We started off class by introducing ourselves and speaking to the students about what they will be learning in the next 2 days from our group. Before we started teaching any material, we went over the classroom rules which we created together. We created a poster and the rules stated, "In fourth grade we...Listen to instructions, Encourage one another, Ask questions, Respect yourself/others, and Never give up." These rules spell out the word LEARN!! We felt that it was incredibly important to introduce the class to these rules in order to succeed. After repeating those rules out loud as a class, I introduced a key terms notepad. This notepad was fill-in-the-blank and had all of the important key terms of the lesson defined on it. The students were to follow along with the powerpoint and fill out the key terms. Next, we moved onto the "Tree of Knowledge poster board." This was a large poster board of a tree where students will post yellow and blue post-it notes stating one thing they know about weather and water and one thing they want to know. Some students shared that they know about the water cycle, precipitation and other students shared that they want to learn where water comes from and how clouds are formed.
This was a great introduction to our word cloud, which we showed on the powerpoint that included different key terms and words that are going to be explored throughout the lesson like "rain, precipitation, condensation, weather," and much more. As soon as we finished reviewing and assessing the students prior knowledge, we got right into the material! We spoke about water, why plants need water to live, the water cycle, droughts, air and atmosphere, layers of the atmosphere, air masses, climate vs. weather, plants in the four seasons, and watering gardens. We had a jam packed day of material to teach so we didn't have much time for all of the activities we had planned because we wanted to make sure that the students became aware of everything we wanted to teach them! Throughout the powerpoint we provided checks for understanding which assessed the class's knowledge throughout our lesson. After doing a few of those, finishing our powerpoint, and watching a few videos, we passed out a weather and water web organizer, which showed a cloud with water droplets coming down from it. This was our guided practice activity! We had the class turn and talk to the students at their table to discuss different key terms/facts they learned today during our lesson. As they were doing this, I replicated the web organizer on the white board so I can write down the student's answers as they stated them out loud to the class. Even though we didn't have much time to do this activity, the students loved it and came up with great key terms and facts!
This was a great introduction to our word cloud, which we showed on the powerpoint that included different key terms and words that are going to be explored throughout the lesson like "rain, precipitation, condensation, weather," and much more. As soon as we finished reviewing and assessing the students prior knowledge, we got right into the material! We spoke about water, why plants need water to live, the water cycle, droughts, air and atmosphere, layers of the atmosphere, air masses, climate vs. weather, plants in the four seasons, and watering gardens. We had a jam packed day of material to teach so we didn't have much time for all of the activities we had planned because we wanted to make sure that the students became aware of everything we wanted to teach them! Throughout the powerpoint we provided checks for understanding which assessed the class's knowledge throughout our lesson. After doing a few of those, finishing our powerpoint, and watching a few videos, we passed out a weather and water web organizer, which showed a cloud with water droplets coming down from it. This was our guided practice activity! We had the class turn and talk to the students at their table to discuss different key terms/facts they learned today during our lesson. As they were doing this, I replicated the web organizer on the white board so I can write down the student's answers as they stated them out loud to the class. Even though we didn't have much time to do this activity, the students loved it and came up with great key terms and facts!
After this activity, we gave the students an exit ticket consisting of 2 short answer and 5 multiple choice questions, which created our independent practice! Some of the students were bummed out that they had to answer questions, but I reminded them that they were not getting graded on these questions, it was for us teachers to see what they learned and how we can improve our teaching in the future! After students completed the exit ticket, we thanked them for participating and told them to get excited for our Inquiry lesson on Thursday!!
Overall, our lesson went fantastic! Of course everyone wishes to have more time with the students in order to perfect every part of the lesson. Considering the little time we had to prepare and only an hour to teach all of that material, I thought that my fieldwork group and I did very well! We created an informational lesson, yet it was engaging. The students seemed to learn a lot and raised their hand to speak at any chance they could get! We're so excited to teach our final lesson to the fourth grade, which will be a very eye-opening one!
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