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:
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.
