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.
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