Lesson #1: Instructional Decisions/Teaching

I opened my lesson on the solar system by explaining to my "students" that if I taught this lesson in my own classroom I would draw the class' attention in by reading The Magic School Bus: Lost in the Solar System. Since there was only a thirty minute time frame for this lesson, I moved on to the KWL chart (Know, Want to know, Learned). I had my students open up a Word document and create the table so they could fill in what they knew and what they wanted to know about parts of the solar system. I should have explained the process of how to make the table on the Word document before having them start working on it because that was a necessary point to make and it caused a delay in my teaching since I had to explain the process individually with each student in order to make sure that they understood. I had them share aloud what they had written down and then told them that their next task was to research the planets in order to demonstrate what visitors would sense when they visited each planet. I read off the questions they needed to answer and told them that they could write down their research below their KWL chart on the same document. Ultimately, I explained that they needed to make a slideshow using Prezi to show to their class what it would be like to visit the planets. Since I had three students, I assigned each student three planets because I decided to leave Pluto as a planet as well. The problem with Prezi was that it was time consuming because each student needed to sign up in order to use the online slideshow creator and I still had to show them which template to use for their presentation. I wasn't able to have my students finish all of their work because we were running out of time; so I had them quickly share the most interesting facts they learned about the planets and write down in the Learned section of the chart that fact that caught their attention.

I feel that the lesson implementation clearly met the standards and objectives I had planned for my students to have the opportunity to learn about. Each student learned at least a few facts of each of the planets that they didn't know about prior to the lesson and they used researching and presentation creating skills throughout the assignment stages. If I had extra time, it would have been more beneficial so that I could write out the questions that I wanted my students to research and have it handy so that I didn't need to repeat the questions, I could demonstrate how to create a KWL chart so that my students could follow along, and then by the end of the lesson and researching process, I could have my students present their work to the class so they essentially teach one another about the solar system. If they had more time, they would probably have learned much more from the presentation that we weren't able to get to. Other than the time crunch, I feel that the lesson went well and the materials were available ahead of time.