Engineering Lesson

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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