Finally Class at Last

After a delayed start we were finally able to meet our students that will be apart of our after school program! The program consists of about 20 students from 3rd to 5th grade. Our first afternoon meeting with them we were asked to bring a getting to know you activity, a way to introduce our topic and a book that has to do with science.

The topic my group chose was clean energy. We asked the students what energy was, what types of energy they know of and how energy works. We did this so we could see what we would have to teach them and what we could review based on what they already knew. When we met with the groups of students we noticed a couple of different things. First we noticed there were a couple of major behavior problems with the students. Right away my group agreed we would have to strategically place the students seats when we teach our lessons and stand scattered amongst the students. We decided this because we noticed "cliques" amongst the students, we knew that if we wanted the lesson to go smoothly we would have to separate them. Secondly we noticed that the skill levels varied greatly amongst the students. Some students seemed to love science and knew a lot of different information where as others had a hard time answering our simple questions. To make sure the lesson would be beneficial for everyone we knew we had to make it engaging with different types of assessments so the students didn't struggle or get bored while we were teaching. After the "meet & greet" session I knew we had our work cutout for us and we should start planning sooner rather than later. I am excited to see how the program goes and the different lessons my colleagues and I will teach!