Pollution Party

Pollution Party

       Finally, it was my group's turn to teach! I walked into the classroom a bit nervous with butterflies in my stomach, but the minute that the actual teaching process began, I felt confident and I overcame my nerves. My group and I organized our lessons so that we knew when and how to express emphasis and what we are teaching. Each one of my group members became and expert on their topic and our jobs. I believe that we were all knowledgeable about what we were teaching. Time management was big thing that I was worried about because I thought that our experiment would take a lot of time, but as I kept checking the clock, I knew we would have enough time and I was able to relax. 

Here is the link to our Google Slides Presentation that combined our Direct and Inquiry instruction. 

Direct Instruction: 

During our direct instruction, we taught information about the types of pollution and the three R's: reduce, reuse, and recycle. I felt that our lesson went according to plan. The picture on the left is my interpretation of our presentation because it shared basic information to students. The "lazy person's" part of the picture, I am referring to people in general when they are littering and not thinking about the consequences. Each one of the group members played an important part to the successful outcome of our direct instruction. The reason why there were so many visuals instead of words on the slides are because personally, I am a visual learner and a presentation for younger kids should revolve around images instead of words for the students to create visual, mental memories and understandings of the terms. 

Inquiry Instruction:

         During the inquiry instruction, Group #4 engaged the students into a water pollution themed experiment that is called Fred's Journey. Throughout the experiment, the students were to pollute the water with ingredients based on a narration of Fred's Journey. I believed that our inquiry instruction went the same way as the direct instruction like how we hoped that it would. We maintained classroom management by having a teacher candidate with each group and one teacher candidate (me) walking from group to group to facilitate. The point of this inquiry instruction was to show students how polluted water can have an impact on marine life and give them the opportunity to reflect on water pollution in general. 

Constructive Criticism & Overall Opinion:

         Personally, I think our group did a very well job with presenting and teaching our lesson plans to the students. The students seemed really engaged into the lessons and there were no major complications aside from the brief technical difficulty when trying to open the independent practice for our direct instruction. For the direct instruction, I wish that we could have met up as a complete group before hand to really rehearse, but we did meet up briefly before actually teaching to rehearse. For the inquiry instruction, I wish that we could have had more time for the students to fully complete the independent practice because I felt like it was a bit rushed. Excellent Job Group #4! We did it!