It's finally time, my group's turn to teach the 4th graders!
Our topic to teach was about the Universe and everything in it. We covered the universe, galaxies, the solar system, astronomy, gravity, the sun, the moon and the four inner planets. We split up each topic so we each taught two and one of the inner planets.
We implemented classroom rules in order to keep control of the students.
- When we said "Mac & cheese, eyes on me" the students responded "Beef Stew, eyes on you" The students loved this, and even said it one day when we weren't even teaching them 😳 I did tend to notice that the more we said it, the louder they would yell it, so that was a downside
- There was a traffic light on the board. When the light was green, it was a good volume, yellow meant it was getting too loud and red meant they needed to stop talking and regroup
- We also had a stop sign that we would hold up to signal that everyone needed to stop talking and look to the front of the room. This was a good idea, but we didn't follow through with it as much as we planned to
While teaching, the students were engaged because they were raising their hands to ask questions. They also all participated in the questions we had every couple slides to check for understanding. If we only received an answer from one student, we would check for understanding from the whole class by saying different things such as, "put your hand on your head if you agree, put your hand on your tummy if you disagree" Switching these signals up also kept them on their toes.
For guided practice, we played Kahoot. The students were all familiar with this game, but they got so excited that it got way too loud in the classroom. Although we switched the traffic light to yellow during this time, we should have announced that we did so they knew to quiet down.
After finishing our direct instruction lesson, we were all even more excited to get back in the classroom to teach our inquiry lesson!
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