Field Teaching Day One

Today, my partner and I taught our first lesson of the water unit we created. The students greeted us with many hugs and questions about what they were going to explore today. They have come to realize that when we visit their classroom they are involved in a new activity that breaks up the routine of their day. They were all very excited and enthusiastic about participating in today’s lesson.

As it was the introductory lesson on water, the students explored the topic on a basic and broad scope. After listening to the read aloud, we discussed the essential components of the book and our unit: floating and sinking, solid, liquid, and gas, and the natural flow of water on earth. We used a familiar structure for today’s lesson, so the transition to our unit would be easy for them. The formative assessment was in the form of a chart. As a whole class, students offered ideas about water while we recorded them to serve as a guide for activities and review. We are working with young students and have found it very difficult to provide physical individual evidence to serve as an assessment. After talking with our professor, we decided that a physical formative assessment could be in the form of a chart, while orally monitoring student understanding on an individual basis. Too often in the upper grades, we find it hard to get more than one or two students to contribute their thoughts. It was nice to see that so many of the students wanted to contribute a piece of what they had learned to the chart.

The students in the classroom learn in various ways. The children really enjoy hands on activities in addition to read alouds and other forms of instruction. We felt it was important to provide another avenue for the students to express what they had learned today by giving journal writing and drawing time as a lesson summative assessment. The children really enjoyed this portion of the lesson, as I heard many comments such as “I really had fun today!” That at least tells me they are interested in the topic and enjoyed the lesson. After reviewing their journals, I was able to further understand which of the concepts they were able to grasp in addition to concepts that were unclear to them. It is our goal to create a book for each student that includes their written work, usually the physical form of assessment we will evaluate. Hopefully they will use this book at school or at home to revisit all of the concepts they explored about water throughout the week.

Assessment is the part of teaching that I find most difficult. Creating assessments that are reliable, valid, and unbiased while ensuring that the assessment is developmentally appropriate is a challenging task. Through my teaching experience with this unit, I am sure that there will be many areas to reflect and improve upon. However, I’m glad to have the opportunity to learn these important instructional skills as a pre-service teacher, so I will be stronger when I am actually teaching without the guidance from my professors.

The depth required for the lesson plans is very helpful to me. Scripting the lesson plan is great because it requires me to think about vocabulary, key concepts, and student responses prior to teaching the lesson. Although I am sure that the students will come up with an answer I had not thought of, scripting prepares the teacher for a range of responses. (As it happened today- I asked one of the students what state a specific object was in and he responded the United States! It was so cute I almost started to laugh, but then I realized that my question was unclear and I restated it.)