Preschool Engineering Lesson

This is the final time that we were at Brigham and each and every one of us were teaching a lesson at the same time. We got the neat opportunity to to teach in the preschool classroom so we got to have the students all to ourselves. These students were a little bit different from the kindergarten kids. These students did not talk as much so we just got a lot of blank stares coming our way, minus the two/three students who did all the talking.

To start out this lesson we had the students gathered on the rug. I started out by trying to pull out their prior and background knowledge by starting to see if they even knew what a parachute was. When they all just stared back at me I decided to move on and I started to read the book which was How Do Parachutes Work? by Jennifer Boothroyd. As I read the story I noticed that yet again they were looking at me like they did not understand a word that I was saying. My goal for working with ELL students was to be able to successfully accommodate ELL students. In order to try and accommodate these students and give them a better understanding, I tried to break down the information in the book in simpler terms. I tried to use the pictures to help the students better understand what we were talking about and what we would try and do later with them with the experiments. I also tried to connect what we were talking about to things that they might see in everyday life such as connecting the toggles on the parachute to a steering wheel in the car.

We then broke up into two different groups so there was five students in one group with two teachers and four students with two teachers. In my group we have the four students. We used many different objects to compare the weight and we had them hold the different objects so they could see if the objects were light or heavy. We then dropped the object without the parachute first so that we could compare what it would like when we dropped them with the parachute. Since they are so young. They were having trouble with the concept of time and kept saying that every object went faster with the parachute on which was not true. In order to accommodate these students to help understand, I had the students turn around when the other group was doing a comparison with the two different parachutes with two different objects. This was able to give them a better understanding of how the heavier the object the faster the object with fall even with the parachute on.

In the end they were able to tell us something that they learned and that is really all that we wanted them to get since they gave up blank stares for most of the lesson. This was a very good lesson to help me move towards my goal for the last time. I had to think on my feet and find other ways in which to accommodate the students that was not always using their native language. Another way that I did this was when we were talking about fast and slow. I used hand motions as well as said fast, fast and stretched out slow so that it was said slowly.

This lesson did not go entirely as we had planned. We felt very rushed and unprepared for this lesson, but we were able to think on our feet and we think that the students had fun. They were able to do hands on lessons and learn more about parachutes. It was great to see them actually participate and answer questions unlike they were able to in the beginning of the lesson.

Book:

Parachute links:

http://www.playparachutes.com/pagaac.html

http://www.sciencekids.co.nz/lessonplans/flight.html

http://kidsactivitiesblog.com/18461/make-a-parachute-kids-parachute-resistance-experiments

Exceeds: We gave the lesson to the teacher when we were done, we included pictures in our lesson. In the blog I exceeded with the word count and included the book and other resources. 

Clinical Lesson

On Monday November 10, I taught my science lesson to my kindergarten students. I taught them a lesson about leaves that coincided with my bag-it that I sent home, so I had one leaf expert in my class and it also helped start off our two week study (theme) on fall/harvest. I feel like I had a good understanding and knowledge of this topic before I taught it. Like I mentioned before I did a lot of research about this since it was based a little bit off of my bag-it that was focused around leaves as well. I was also asked to do a math station that focused on leaves as well for our math rotations. In this we did leaf sorting. You might say that I am now an expert on leaves! Before this time I had not had the experience of teaching a science lesson to my kindergartners besides the ones that were at Brigham. They do science on the days that I am not there so this was also different for them to have science out of routine. While it is best practice to keep schedules and routines with students so they know what to expect by incorporating it with their math time we were able to still make it fit into the schedule. To keep a good classroom management component I had the students constantly moving and using their muscles so that they are able to connected kinetically with the material and keep it longer in their memory as well as getting them up and moving every so often kept their attention and kept them engaged.

Whole Class Leaf Graph

While I thought that this lesson went pretty good, but there was still a lot that I could have improved on, I still had some strengths to this lesson. While I read a book about leaves to my students Leaf Jumpers by Carole Gerber, I had them stop and pause and do make inferences about what leaves do at different times of the year, especially in the fall. This way the students were engaged during the lesson and they were thinking about what is going on. Once I had them do this then they really started to listen and become focused on what I wanted them to be. With 29 kindergartners, sometimes it is hard to get them all to be on task and doing what you would like them to be doing. By stopping and asking questions I was able to get them to realize that they needed to be paying attention to me and the book so that they could answer my questions. After the book was finished I made sure that they knew what I wanted them to take away from the book. We were discussing what leaves need to grow and what happens when they do not get this. Once we talked about it a lot they started to get it! One of the strengths that I had was constantly asking the students what the leaves needed to survive. My lesson was integrated with math and we talked about graphing the leaves that we had. During the book we also talked about the different colors that the leaves could be. I wanted to use this as the basis for our graphing. Previously I had cut out leaves in different colors so that each student was able to get a leaf to participate in our class graph. I let the students pick the categories that could go on our graph with prompting from the different colored leaves that they were given. By letting them choose what would go on our graph they were able to feel like it was "their" graph and wanted to participate in it and pay attention because it was something that they made and not something that I was just telling them what to do. I also used the same colored markers as the colors that they gave me so that we were also learning to recognize our color words, with the help of the actual color! I also provided some engaging questions about our graph by having them come up one by one to tell us about their leaf and place it on our graph. Then I asked them questions about the most and the least as well as what our graph tells us. By engaging the students in higher level thinking questions they were able to fully understand what I was trying to get them to do. I also had the students engage in a group activity and where at their table spots they were able to go back and create their own leaf. We then were able to use questioning and descriptions to have them talk about their leaf and there it could fall on our graph. This got them thinking about the different colors that leaves can be as well as the different shapes that leaves could be as well. I was able to redirect the students who colored their leaves with rainbow colors back to the real colors that leaves are with these questions. I was also able to tie the lesson together with their own graphs that the students were able to complete, this also connected with their math journals that they are familiar with. This is something that we usually do together, but I wanted to see if they were able to complete it on their own after doing it numerous times. This was also good for my cooperating teacher to see so that we could see if there is anything that we need to cover for future use of these graphs in their math journals. This was the wrap up to the lesson because it connected it back to the big graph that they made in the beginning and they were able to then read books about leaves when they were done.

Group Leaf Coloring

While a lot of this lesson did go well there is still a lot that could be improved on. Timing is one big one. I struggle with this every single time I plan and execute a lesson and this is something my cooperating teacher and I have been trying to work on. I get really excited when I plan a lesson and it has so many awesome parts in it and I don't realize how long it will take. I also forget to realize that with 29 kindergarten students that things will take a lot longer than they normally take so I really need to be cautious about my time. I can also improve on my positive reinforcement so that the students will know what I expect out of them without me flat out saying it every single time. By making positive comments about what the students are doing that I like and want them to be doing then the others who are watching them will see what they should be doing and do it so that they could get complimented. There are a couple students who still struggle with raising their hand and instead they just like to blurt out what they would like to say. It would help if I remind all students my expectations for them and to raise their hands so they know right from the beginning that I need them to raise their hand and take their turn. It would also be helpful to make sure the students are not distracted by anything. One of my students had her coat hanging off her arm and asked if she could put it away. I wanted her to wait so that she would not miss instruction or disrupt the other students because I have come to find that once one student asks to take off their sweatshirts. Unfortunately she was being more distracting by not putting her jacket away than it was to just have her go and put it away quickly. I think that I should have given them clearer directions and tell them exactly what I want them to do, because they cannot read my mind. While they were doing their leaves in their groups I wanted them to make their leaves real leaf colors, but instead I had some tables make rainbow leaves. Like I mentioned before I was able to redirect them once we were talking about it and I was able to get them to tell me about what color real leaves actually are. I might have needed to model a step for the students so they understand better what I expect of them. At the end I collected their individual graphs so I could assess them. Even though I told them that they needed to put their names on it, I should have had everyone flip their paper open and write their name on it before they began or included a spot in which they could have put their name. I was also missing a paper and it might have been easier for me to see which students do not have their names on their papers by having them leaving their papers at their table spots when they are done and giving the students better directions for when they have finished.

Individual Leaf Graphs

These students were engaged the entire time and they asked a lot of questions. One quote that we enjoyed the most from one of my students is, "Why are we graphing? Is it just part of our day?" They understand our routines and were a little thrown off my me teaching science on a Monday. They were able to answer the questions that I posed to them as well. We were able to have meaningful conversations and they really enjoyed talking about their leaves. They thought that the graph was really neat since it was different from what we normally do, but since it is similar to what has been done before they had a good general idea of what I wanted them to do so they were able to participate to the fullest. The activity was not something that was newly taught to them so it was more review and going more in depth, but with different content. They are beginning to understand that we can graph all different things and all different ways and they get really excited to do this graphing.

Leaf Sorting Math Station

Exceeds: I went over 1,000 words, I included 5 objectives instead of just 2-3, I gave my CT the lesson to use in the future, I planned a math leaf station that went with along with my lesson that was used throughout the week at the math station and I included pictures of what we did.

Preschool Experience #1

This week I helped out with the preschool lesson taught by Julia and Kayla that wrapped up the five senses that were being taught in depth in the weeks prior. I was in charge of the station that reviewed the sense of hearing. I had a computer with many different sounds and I played them for the small group of students that I had that came to my station. I then had the students guess what sound they heard. Some of the students were able to get it and others were a little clueless. I think that these teachers did a wonderful job of reviewing the five senses for these students and they were able to understand the different senses that they have and can use for different things.

My goal for working with ELL students is to be able to successfully accommodate ELL students while working with them. During this lesson while I was working with them, when they were struggling with the different sounds that might have been unfamiliar to them, I provided them with some hints as to where they might hear these different sounds that they could make connections to or might even be familiar with. I know that even though they should all know what the sound of thunder sounds like a lot of them thought that it sounded like a train! This could be due to the fact that the students could live close to a train and hear it all the time because they do sound similar. There was also the lion roar that they struggled with. In order to help them out with this one, I had them think of a time they were at the zoo or maybe say a video or picture of zoo animals. This way they could make connections even if they have never seen an actual lion or heard it roar before. I was also able to accommodate some of them by using the Spanish word for some of the sounds that I knew and I was able to use the help of some of the students to help out the other students who were struggling. While the teachers did not plan it this way, most of the time there were students who were more dominant in the group and liked to talk more paired with a student who either did not talk as much or did not speak a lot of English. This way the students were able to help each other. I tried to make them feel welcome as well because this should be another great goal of working with ELL students. In order to accomplish this I made sure that each of the students knew what my name was and I asked that theirs were. I also tried to use their names during the small amount of time that they were with me. This might be good to do with pictures that were native to the students so that they were able to choose the picture that goes with the sound they hear, they might be able to get these better than if they just had to come up with the name of the sound. Being able to accommodate these students and make them feel welcome even in the small group that they are in is also bringing me closer to becoming a more culturally responsive teacher.

Overall I think that both the students and the teachers did a wonderful job with this lesson. They were able to learn from this and interact and keep the students engaged well. They were also able to utilize the extra teachers that were in the room to have them help teach, monitor and observe the students.

Here are some different activities that can be done with students to help with learning about sound (since that is the station that I was at) especially ELL students:

http://www.prekinders.com/what-makes-sound/

http://mamierecette.canalblog.com/archives/2010/02/13/16894850.html

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Five-5-senses-foldable-science-station-center-cut-paste-sort-kindergarten-ESL-448670

Exceeds: I wrote over 500 words and I included helpful links.

Air, Water and Land Lesson- Kindergarten

This past week along with Alaina and Jessie I were in the kindergarten classroom and taught a lesson focusing on air, water and land. To teach this lesson we used a K-ESS3-1 use a model to represent te relationship between the needs of different plants or animals (including humans) and the places they live. In order to meet this standard we read the students a story about a plant, we then broke off into three different groups and had the students rotate to a plant station at the smartboard and they will learn that a plant needs water and sunlight to survive. The next station was an animal station where they determined where animals lived in different habitats and what they needed to survive (water). The last station is the human station, where the students listed different things that humans need to survive (water among other things) and then they were required to draw a picture about something that a human needs. We ended with a finger play about a flower.

I think that some of the strengths that our lesson has was that we had the students engaged the entire time, the students were relatively well behaved, they were on task and they participated fully. They were also able to move the students fairly quickly between the stations and have them get the materials that they needed in an efficient manner. I also think that there was a strength with the teachers and the helpers that we have. The teachers had great confidence working in front of the students once the lesson started.

We had the students engaged and there was a lot of participation when we asked them questions at the beginning of the lesson like what do we think plans need to survive, what about animals and humans. There was a lot of participation from the students during the read aloud. They were attentive and there were many hands that were raised during the book to ask and answer questions. I was in charge of the plant station and we saw a lot of participation there. While we did it on the smartboard it was more efficient for me to be the one actually doing the activity. I asked the students questions about things that the plants needed to survive, and they came up with some really good answers, "soil, water, sun, heat, roots, and food." When we were doing the activity and making the plant grow I wanted them to tell me when they thought we should give the plant water and I would water the plant. There was one student who was so excited to give the plant water that every couple of seconds he would yell out water! and raise his hands while he said that. The students were able to move quickly because we told them exactly where they needed to go and while we were spread throughout the entire classroom we made sure that we were in spots away from each other, so that the students would not be distracted, but yet they were in a direct line to each other so there was an easy route for the students to take. We also had them get their crayons before they went to the human station during the moving and that helped to cut down on the time it takes to do that during the station. I was also helpful that the helpers in the room moved with the students and were able to help move the students along fast and get them were they needed to be with the materials that were needed and kept the kids under control if need be. I think that the confidence of the teachers help. I know we were very nervous before we were about to teach. Once we were in front of the students it came our naturally and we stopped being nervous and we were able to actively engage the students. At least for myself I started to just let everything fall into place and that I knew as a teacher we have to think on our feets and be prepared for the worse and nothing actual went as bad as we thought it might.

I think that we could have improved on the flow of the lesson. I thought it went pretty well, but in the beginning we only talked about the plants. I think that if we were able to incorporate animals and humans into the introduction. I think that if we were able to do that the lesson would have been able to go a lot smoother and they might have had more to talk about and participate with in the different stations. I think that maybe we needed to have smaller groups for the stations as well. I think that even though the groups went pretty smooth it would be helpful if they were a bit smaller and maybe it would have been better and they could have interacted with the plant station more.

I think that the students were very interested in the material. They were able to connect to the material as well because this is something that they are able to interact with every day. They see plants on a daily basis outside the classroom and sometimes even inside if they have a classroom plant. They are humans so they know exactly what they need and some of them might have pets or go to the zoo and see animals. I think that because we incorporated many different learning techniques into the lesson it grabbed their attention. They were able to move around and they were able to do different things at each of the stations.

Just like the students I think that we as the teachers of this lesson were very knowledgeable on it. We were able to use our own knowledge from out lives and what we even learned in this class through the modules like the plant station to teach these students. We were able to make sure that we connected to their knowledge and connected the entire lesson together at the end with a song that they were able to sing and hopefully remember. Some of us were able to use some Spanish words like agua to reach out to those ELL students and move towards our goal of making the students feel welcome in the environment. I think that because we were positive and encouraging the students were able to feel welcomed and we were able to move towards that goal as well.

The way the students asked questions and were able to answer ours showed us that the students developed a great understanding of this topic in such a short period of time and that they were able to use their prior knowledge to really ground this information into their heads.

Overall I think that this lesson went really well. We were able to meet the needs of the students and keep them actively engaged throughout the whole lesson. We were able to reach out to our ELL students by making them feel invited and welcomed and I am keeping on working towards my goal. I think that the students and the teacher of the classroom really enjoyed the lesson that we had to put on. She was thrilled when we let her keep the lesson plan and materials.

Here are some of the materials we used in our lesson:

Book
One Bean by: Anne Rockwell


Finger Play:

FLOWER FINGERPLAY

A hand is a bud                   
Closed up tight                     (close hand into a fist)
Without a tiny
Speck of light.

Then slowly the petals
Open for me                          (slowly open hand, one finger at a time)
And here is a beautiful
Flower I see!

http://www.preschoolexpress.com/music_station04/music_station_may04.shtml

Plant activity:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/scienceclips/ages/5_6/growing_plants.shtml


Exceeds: I included materials from our lesson and some extra songs and finger plays and I wrote over 1,000 words.

Kindergarten Classroom Experience #2

This week I was able to be in the kindergarten classroom again to help assist Taylor and Alicia in their lesson about living and non-living things. I thought they did a wonderful job grabbing the attention of the students with a song about living things. I think that this was something that was very good to grab their attention with. Children tend to latch onto songs and remember things better through songs. In my own PDS classroom we played songs about colors and my one student who has a hard time remembering anything loved the songs and was able to sing them back to us for days and was also able to learn how to spell his color words and what things are associated with each object. The students seemed to really like the song and they were then able to remember that a living thing eats and breathes and grows. They then had the students to a smartboard activity with them to make sure that it really stuck in their heads what a living thing is and what things might seem like living things, but really are not. This activity involved vortexes where the students used the pointer to drag the different objects into the living vortex and the non-living vortex. The students were able to self assess with this because if they put the object in the wrong  vortex it would kick it back out and they could try again. While observing this the students seemed to have a really good grasp of what a living and nonliving this is. There was only an object or two that they struggled with. The teachers were asking them questions such as "why is it living/nonliving? how do you know?" This is important to check for understanding with the students. If they do not know that a living thing eats and breathes and grows then they might want to go back and do a little bit of reteaching before they move on and the students do another activity. The students seemed to have fun with this activity and were given the freedom to choose the next person to participate after them. It was good that they had a lot of objects so that most of the class was able to participate, but they were only short like 5 objects and it would have been nice to see all of the students be able to participate and that could have been another assessment to see if everyone understood that part of the lesson.

For the next part I was put at a table with Alicia and I had to take notes about what the students said. The five students who were at the table with me were really eager to participate in the activity of sorting the picture cards into living and nonliving things. Most of the students were really vocal which was awesome to hear and were able to tell us right away what the picture was and if it was living or nonliving (it eats, it breathes, it grows). They did struggle with the rhinoceros and were convinced that it was a dinosaur. I think that to help this particular group of ELL students and to help me reach my goal of working with ELL students is to use pictures that would be familiar to them. Maybe that particular animal is not something that they have seen before or some of the objects they might not know too because they are so young. Including pictures that young children would be able to distinguish and ones that maybe are familiar to the students and either their culture or what country they are from.

My goal for the ELL students was to be able to successfully accommodate ELL students. I think with this group of students  and this lesson was a little hard to meet with them. Like I mentioned before this would be good to do with pictures that were native to the students. I feel like this would be better suited for my PDS classroom with ELL students because I have a handful in there and it would be easier to carry out goals with then and also because I see them on a consistent basis and I know them and their needs really well. I think that my goal for next time should be to incorporate more Spanish into our lessons that we are teaching with these students.

Overall I think that both the students and the teachers did a wonderful job with this lesson. They were able to learn from this and interact and keep the students engaged well. They were also able to utilize the extra teachers that were in the room to have them help teach, monitor and observe the students.

Here are some other awesome links I found to help teach living and nonliving things.

http://www.giftofcuriosity.com/books-about-living-and-nonliving/

http://www.kindergartenkindergarten.com/2012/03/a-science-mini-unit-living-and-non-living.html

http://firstgradewow.blogspot.com/search/label/free?updated-max=2013-01-13T11:02:00-08:00&max-results=20&start=27&by-date=false

Exceeds: I included links and I wrote over 500 words.

Kindergarten Classroom Experience #1

This past Friday, I was a a part of the team that taught the group of kindergarten students. The lesson that we taught was on the five senses. There were seven of us girls in the classroom and broke up the lesson between us all. I was in charge of the first part of the lesson in which I introduced the five senses and figuring out what they know and what they do not know. I was able to get them to tell me three out of the five senses and I helped them out with the last two. Then I sang a song to them first and then I had them repeat after me several times so that I knew that they were able to pick up on it and I heard all of their voices singing with me. I used a poster with the pictures and words on it and hung it on the board so that they were able to see it and follow along and so they were also able to get the information given to them in different modes.

Then we went around and explained what each station would be and had the students break up into their table spots. The teachers went around to each table and rotated from there because of the amount of time it takes to transition young students we decided with out limited classroom time that we would rotate ourselves. I floated around because I already did the part that I was assigned to do. We had a sight station with different colored objects, a smell station with different smells in paper bags, we had a listening station with sounds that they might hear in their everyday lives, a taste station where they got to taste the difference between M&Ms and Skittles and finally we had a touch station which was very similar to what we did in class with the balloons and the different materials that were in the balloons that the students got to feel and guess what was in there. I feel like the stations went smoothly and the students were very engaged. Finally, we ended with a review of what our five senses were, what we did at each station and we sang the song a couple more times. 

My goal for the ELL students was to be able to successfully accommodate ELL students. I think with this group of students  and this lesson was a little hard to meet with them. While we were at the stations we would ask the students what was the word for things in Spanish, but they were able to speak English pretty proficiently. I feel like this would be better suited for my PDS classroom with ELL students because I have a handful in there and it would be easier to carry out goals with then and also because I see them on a consistent basis and I know them and their needs really well. I think that my goal for next time should be to incorporate more Spanish into our lessons that we are teaching with these students. 

Overall I think that we did a good job, we used the knowledge from class about the five senses because we did a lesson together with that and then carried it with us to our students in the classroom. I feel like we were able to accommodate the needs of the students in the classroom by engaging them and asking about their native language and being able to incorporate that when we could into the different parts of the lesson. We were able to keep them engaged by rotating, but I think that it was hard for them to sit in the same spot for so long. Because there were students who were rolling on the ground and not being able to sit at the carpet while we were trying to teach and they got very distracted if they were not at the tables so I think that next time we need to have all the students at a table. Especially the students at the rug so I would probably make sure there was at least some movement aspect in there so that they are not sitting the entire time because then students tend to get restless and bored even if the lesson is engaging. I think that this is a lesson that could definitely be implemented again with some changes in mind and it could be very successful. 

Exceeds: I wrote more than 500 words, I added a picture and I will comment on 3 other blogs. 

Science Autobiography

My name is Megan Catherine Larem and I am from Westmont, Illinois which is a small town about 45 minutes west of Chicago. When I was in elementary school we had three tiny elementary schools. I was from the smallest one South Elementary school from Kindergarten to 5th grade, but always had the largest class size. We would always bring in an extra teacher and I always ended up in that extra teacher's class. I remember hearing what the other elementary schools were doing with science like dissecting animals or doing other fun activities, which we were barely doing anything science related. I specifically remember in 2nd grade we were making volcanoes for a science lesson. Me, being the perfectionist that I am did not just want to bring in a small water bottle to create the volcano out of. So with the help of my parents we did some research to look at volcanoes and even how to create our very own out of clay. We took the water bottle that we were required to use and made a huge clay volcano out of it. I remember feeling like I had learned a lot more about volcanoes than the other students because I went and did research on my own. Another big part of my science experience that I remember was a group of us students that they labeled similar to a gifted group and we were part of Quest. This allowed us to be taken out of class and go into the LRC to do experiments with another teacher. There was one that we did on air and movement were we blew up a balloon and taped a piece of straw to the top of it that had string laced through. The string was taught and hung up from one end of the room to the other and we had our balloons on one end of the string and let go and got to watch our air being released from the balloon and the balloon moving. Another memory is of the life cycle of  chicks in 2nd grade where we had the eggs in the incubators and we raised them into chicks and same with the life cycle of butterflies. We had caterpillars that turned into butterflies and then we got to release them. In the older elementary grades we would switch teachers, my teacher would teach the science and the other teacher would teach the social studies. I remember that we would ALWAYS do the social studies and rarely switched to do the science even though it was my own teacher who taught it

Once I got into Westmont Jr. High in 6th through 8th grade, the only high school in my town and the three elementary schools fed into, we had science as an actual class that we went to for 50 minutes a day. It is hard to remember much of 6th grade. A lot of it was movies, worksheets and a poster we made after our lesson. Trying to think back I cannot recall a single thing we did that year. In 7th grade was when we got to dissect a worm. I love to go fishing so worms do not bother me, but the fact that it was cold and dead and had that formaldehyde smell to it, turned me off really fast to the idea of dissecting a worm. Once he was opened it I thought it was pretty cool to see the insides of the creatures I have been putting on hooks and feeding to fish for years. The rest of the year consisted of a lot of webs that we created while the teacher gave us the notes to fill them in with. I remember doing a simple machine unit as well, but I think that because of the fact that it was a lot of worksheets, it was something that I was really not interested in and did not stick with me. In 8th grade it was the same thing, we read from the book we took notes and we took tests on a weekly basis. I remember doing an experiment with liver, but that was about it. I believe that because a lot of it was not hands on I cannot remember what we did during those years. There is one other science experiment that I remember from Jr. High and it was an egg drop. We went upstairs to the computer lab and dropped them off the balcony that is there.

Moving onto Westmont High school with was the only high school in the town and the one that everyone from the Jr. High went to unless they decided to go to Catholic school. We had three science classes that we had to take. Freshman year you took biology and we dissected frogs. Which went a little bit better than the worm for me, but I am still not a fan of the formaldehyde smell. The teacher always had us takes notes and do at least one experiment a week. I liked that because the experiment went along with the notes that we took. We also had to do a science report at least once a week and we got to find a current science article and write a reflection about it. My sophomore year we had to take chemistry. While this was a lot of equations and notes we also did hands on activities to see the equations in action. One of my favorite things we did in chemistry was a mole project where we created actual moles and I made a watermolen. We also set balloons filled with different gases on fire. That was everyone's favorite experiments. During junior year you took physics. This was a really boring class to me. I did not understand it very well and the teacher was not very helpful. One of the big projects that I remember from this class was our bridge project where we built a bridge and then had to put weight on it and see how much weight our bridge could hold and we got many different ways to build the truss of the bridge with to try and get it to hold the most weight. My senior year I did not have to take any science classes, but I ended up taking a forensics class. It was really cool and we got to go to the FBI building downtown Chicago and we got to do mock crime scenes. It was not a lot of reading and taking notes, but it was a lot of hands on experiments like doing fingerprints with finger print powder and doing shoe molds out of different ground surfaces. Besides the one teacher that I had my junior year of high school most of the science teachers that I had in high school were very helpful and were always willing to make sure that we understood the material.

My physics bridge

Whole class with their bridges

In college I took two science courses. One was geology and the other was biology. The one thing that I liked about both of these courses was that not only was there a lecture but we had labs in which we got to go more in depth about what was covered during the lectures, which was really helpful. The lectures would get to be very long and most of the time would go in one ear and out the other, at least for me because it is hard to learn just through notes.

Based on my science experiences of my past I find that most students learn science the best through hands on activities. While some mapping and note taking in important, making sure there are hands on activities for the students to do to supplement the learning that is also going on in the classroom. Those fun experiments are the things that stick out the most in my mind about my past learning experiences with science. Those are what I remember and not the worksheets. Those classes are the ones in which I do not remember at all what we did except for the piles and piles of worksheets and papers in which we filled out. For me, my philosophy about science is that hands on activities are the ones that will always make sense to me.

Based on my cultural upbringing I learned that anyone could be a scientist, boy or girl. It was not something that just boys did. It was something that everyone could do. This really hit home as well when a friend on mine's older sister went to work for NASA. It really truly made me realize that women can do anything that men can do even in the science field. I want the young girls in my classroom to realize this is true. I want them to know that if they love science it is perfectly okay! I want them to love science!

Given my background in science I want it to be an enjoyable experience for the students. I want them to go through their lives and remember the science experiences that they had in Miss Larem's classroom. I want them to be able to go home and be excited to share with their family members about what they learned in science class.

I am currently a senior at Illinois State University and am in the PDS program. So far in my classroom I have barely seen any science going on. I hope in the future and as the school year progresses I will be observing some more science lessons being taught. While I was in a third grade classroom last semester, we did an experiment with the students that had to do with force and motion. The students each had a cotton ball they had on top of a bottle. They were to squeeze the bottle and try to force the cotton ball into the air and then into the cup that was right next to the bottle. This was something fun that the students loved to do and learned a lot from.