Lesson Reflections

I just thought I'd take a moment and blog about a really awkward lesson that I taught today.  As I may or may not have mentioned in an earlier post, I am stationed in a departmentalized 5th grade classroom.  We (my mentor teacher and I) are responsible for Science and Health.  As you might imagine, the first unit in the Science course deals primarily with the scientific method.  Today I was asked to teach the second and fourth period lesson on inquiry and experimentation.  The first class went alright.  The students took turns reading fom the chapter and I acted as "interpreter" by relating the fundaments as they are set forth to a "real world" example (in this case, a parachute egg drop).  Ok.  There was a worksheet to follow, and as I had not read the worksheet, I had failed to adequately emphasize the parts of the chapter that were to be on the worksheet.  The students (and I) struggled to make sense of it, given my presentation. 

Before the I was to teach the fourth period, Mrs. Pratt and I discussed an idea for making the lesson presentation match up to the worksheet.  She suggested having the students stop their reading at each vocabulary word, at which point we would list the vocabulary in front of the class and discuss its relation to the larger subcategories from the worksheet "Inquiry Tools" and "Experimentation".  (Of which "Experimentation" is an "Inquiry Tool" and "experiment" is a component of "Experimentation")  Suffice to say, my brain is not organized the same way as the text is.  That's why I taught the first class the way I did.  I would let them read through a page or two of text before I would jump in an make sense of the whole lot as it exists in what I believe to be a more sequential and rational order.

In the second class, I was just trying to "go with" the book as they has laid it out.  In doing so, I was stressing points that made little sense to me, in the order that they appear in the book, taking the emphasis off of the natural progression of scientific inquiry as I understand it.  For example "Think about ways in which objects relate to one another.  Figure out the order in which things happen" is presented as the final component of "Experimentation" on the worksheet.

Another reason the lesson was awkward, I believe, was that the lesson became too compartmentalized.  There are around 20 vocabulary words that I needed to stop and elaborate on during the presentation.  I could not get these 20 peices to be puzzle pieces of one coherent picture.  I think the kids just saw vaguely related ingredients.

Also, I was trying to squeeze the things from my first lesson (examples and such) that I knew had worked into my second lesson.  The dynamic of the second lesson was changed entirely, therefore the examples didn't ring like they did the first time around.

I guess, in the end, I just made the mistake of trying to teach to a worksheet that I didn't create.  I couldn't seem to reconcile the book, the worksheet, and my own scientific brain... not on the fly, anyway.   AND, to top it all off, the Special Ed. teacher was in the room with a student for the first time observing my teaching for this lesson.  She probably thinks I'm a fool.