Teaching Science

Last week (October 19-23) we (my clinical partner and myself) taught our science unit on healthy living (nutrition, sleep, and physical activity) to first graders. I had an AWESOME time! Over all the lessons we taught together and as individuals went really well. I was really happy with how well the week really went. Of course there are always things that I will need to continue to improve upon and I am by no means an expert of teaching but I am very happy with how things went. The students understood the material that was presented to them and overall they seemed to enjoy it. One thing that I do want to work on is how to react a little more quickly or have some strategies for when something unexpected comes up. For example the lesson I taught on Wednesday afternoon did not go as well as I wanted it to. One of the students started crying in the middle of the lesson because he felt like he had no friends. One student was complaining about how boring school was (this is a daily occurrence) and one students was very sleepy and not participating. I did my best to especially include these students in the activity by calling on them. But to no avail some of the issues still continued, it did seem to really interrupt the progress of the other students as they seemed interested and in their exit slips even the students that were struggling to follow still correctly identified what I wanted them to. I would just like to have more strategies to help me out in situations like this because I was not sure how I should have reacted. I continued on with my lesson and called on the students to help them to become more engaged and after the lesson I had a little chat with the student who was crying to see if he was okay ( my clinical partner was sitting with him during the lesson trying to solve the problem). I am not sure how to really have handled the situation any different. The students in my classroom will always come first, they are human being with emotions and reactions that will be different day by day. It is also my job as their teacher to guide them along with the content. In order to do that I will need to create a safe place in the classroom where all of my students feel comfort. I found an interesting article that talks about students emotions in the classroom and the best ways to build a safe situation for them.

Taking Account of Emotions in Student-Teacher Relationships