Last Tuesday at Brigham, Amanda, Taylor, Alicia and I taught
an engineering lesson to a group of four kindergartners. Our lesson revolved around the Three Little Pigs. After reading the book we talked about the
different types of houses the pigs built and which ones were stronger than the
others. After this discussion we gave
the students an opportunity to build their own houses. Up until this point, everything was going as I
had expected it would. When the students
started building their own houses is when the lesson started to turn away from
my expectations. I had expected that the
students would have gotten more creative with the materials provided to build
their house. Three of the students used
the base ten blocks, but not in the way I thought they would. I thought they would use the base ten rods
and build up a house that sort of looked like a log cabin. The students used
the base ten rods to build “walls” to their houses and stand them straight up
on the base ten flats. One of the girls
that was working with Taylor built a house out of toothpicks and gum
drops. Her house was not that sturdy and
I thought that it would fall over for sure when we tested them with the hair
dryer. All but one house were able to
stay standing even with the air from the blow dryer on it. The only house to fall apart was Amanda’s
straw house. She purposely built a house
out of straw so that the students could see what it would look like for a house
to fall apart.
For the most part, I would say this lesson went well. We used a bilingual book for the read aloud
of the Three Little Pigs. This would be useful for a bilingual
classroom if the teacher were to actually teach this lesson. I think we also accommodated to the ELL
learners by having many hands-on materials that they were able to
manipulate. The self-assessment sheet we
created also had images of the materials we provided. The students were just supposed to circle the
materials they used and then circle whether or not their house fell over in the
end. There are a few things I would
change about this lesson if we were to do it again. The first thing I would change would be the
environment we taught it in. I
understand that this was a special circumstance and we did not have much space
available, but with three other groups all doing different activities in the
same room as us, it was hard to keep the attention of the group. The other thing I would change would be the
materials we provided. I did not expect
for all of their houses to stand up to the hair dryer and I think that we could
have made a bigger emphasis on the study and weak structure concept had we chosen
different materials. Some other
materials we could have used might be wooden blocks, stick from trees outside,
leaves, and hay. I think that if we kept
the materials close to what the materials were in the story, we would have seen
more variation I the structures of the houses built.
I think that in comparison to the first lesson we
taught/observed at Brigham I have learned so much about ELL accommodations in
lesson planning. I am now more aware of
the procedures that need to be taken in order to successfully engage ELL
students. Some of these things include
using simple language and many visuals.
In the beginning of the semester I thought that the only way you could
accommodate to these learners was to learn some phrases in their native
language, but in reality that is just not practical. I feel so much more prepared to have ELL
students in my classroom now that I did at the beginning of the semester.
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