Wow, I can’t believe I haven’t updated this since my first lesson. The semester ends in 2 weeks so I have so much to share. I only have 2 more days left of being a participant observer at West Side, and I am going to miss my second graders and all the people I met there.
Sadly I can’t post any pictures due to privacy rights.
Lesson 1: The students wrote about a community helper and how that person helps to make our community a happy, healthy, and safe place to be. In addition, some students colored their community helpers and made them look like the person they wrote about. I then turned their works into a book on community helpers (interdisciplinary study with language arts and social studies)
Lesson 2: The students explored poetry using our observations of nature from looking outside the classroom window. The students each created their own poem and drew a picture. I feel they each did an excellent job and I was able to work with two groups of 8 students and learn from my first time presenting the lesson. As a result, the final product of the second group was exactly what I anticipated and I felt very accomplished. (language arts lesson)
Lesson 3: This lesson was my favorite! I took some information from the National Geographic Explorer and information from books and the internet on kites to create a lesson on the history of kites. The students were so excited and were introduced to a great deal of material. They learned many things they did not know about the use of kites (airplanes, weather, lightening). They created a timeline (their first ever) and at the end created their own kites.
Lesson 4: The students learned how to create an origami frog, and write an apostrophe poem, talking to their frog. I felt I accomplished so much in this lesson, tackling a very interactive lesson that incorporated so much, and was able to keep the group on task, complete all my objectives, and finish this all in the limited 30 minutes.
