Teaching Elementary School

Samantha Meyer
Lesson Plan 9/Reflection #9
SCIE 376

This week at Essex Elementary school I taught a review lesson to my students. I believe the lesson went well because the students were engaged, participating, and became confident on past topics taught the previous weeks. I started off the lesson with solving Jasmine’s mystery, which I believe was really beneficial. The past couple of weeks focused on Jasmine and her mystery so I believe it was important to solve the mystery in order to close that lesson. I required students to write a bulleted list of evidence and then a short summary of who and how Jasmine can accuse. The students then shared their summaries. I believe this went well because the students were very enthusiastic about solving the mystery.
Next, I decided to review the topics of matter, properties of matter, and physical and chemical properties. In order to review these topics I decided to have the students participate in new activities to keep them interested and engaged. I showed the students three different balloons. One balloon was frozen with water, one balloon was filled with water, and one balloon was filled with baking soda and put on top of a water bottle with vinegar. This part of the lesson also went very well because the students were able to identify the properties of matter and physical properties of each balloon. The last activity of the lesson was making coke floats. I believe this was the most successful part of the lesson because the students became very excited and engaged but also learned a lot from this activity. I decided to pour the soda into each student’s cup one a time, so the students were able to see the changes close up. The students were very interested and surprised by the changes in their cup and were able to identify the solid, liquid, and gas in the coke float easily, which was the main focus of the activity.
Overall, this was not one of my favorite lessons to teach. Since it was a review I felt like the lesson was unorganized and confusing. I did not feel as confident about the lesson compared to previous lessons, which I believe has a huge correlation to how the lesson goes. I believe what did not go well was that the lesson was very slow and the students started to get bored and distracted. I was constantly trying to keep students focused in between activities and thinking of ways to motivate students to continue working because there was a lot of writing within this lesson. If I were to teach this lesson again, I would definitely make some changes to improve the lesson. I would change the properties of matter activity to make it more interesting to the students and an activity that takes up more time. I would also require less writing in the lesson and more discussion if I taught this again because the students got easily distracted and bored when they were required to write responses in their notebooks.
This has been the ninth lesson taught this semester and I have definitely learned a lot about myself as a science teacher. While teaching lesson 9, I have learned the importance of preparation. I made sure to test all of the activities beforehand to know exactly how each worked and how much time each activity took. I have also learned how to make changes when necessary while teaching in order to improve the lesson and specific questions to ask students to keep them motivated, thinking, and learning. This has only been the 9th science lesson I have taught so there is still area of improvement. I believe as a science teacher I can improve with becoming even more confident on the science topics I am teaching. It is important to understand and be confident on the science you are teaching to your students if you want them to understand and believe you.

Word count: 663