Breaking the Ice

Tonight  was our first night with the students! We got learn what they know about science and what they expect to learn from their time with us. We accomplished this by having them take a pre-test before we started our icebreaker activities. I was helping a 2nd grader with her test and I noticed that all of the groups questions were somewhat hard for that age group. Do you agree? Although, we have a lot of 4th and 5th graders in the class and we were trying to keep their interest with the questions, I believe all the students struggled; especially after reviewing the tests results. I think that the test needs to be shorter next time and the questions a lot easier, like on a first grade level or worded differently, because the students seemed to have a little bit of anxiety trying to answer them. The students seem to be excited to learn science, especially through experiments, activities, and in groups.

My group is going to teach about the 5 senses for our lesson plan, so we came up with two activities introducing the students to the 5 senses. For our first activity we chose to use the theme of the four seasons and using your senses to discover them. We labeled each of the 5 senses on an index card and had the student pick a card, according to the sense they chose, the student had to come up with something using that sense for the season of which we picked. For example, what do you smell in the fall? What do you see in fall? etc.. We loved this idea for an introduction, but we soon realized that we ran out of time and we weren't able to complete the next activity in its entirety. For our second activity, we decided to have it hands on, as that is more fun and engaging. The students were blindfolded for taste, hear, and smell. The students had to use their senses and guess what they were tasting, hearing, and smelling. The students tasted lemons and twizzlers, they heard tape ripping and coins in a jar, and they smelled vanilla and coffee. The students were pretty awesome with guessing, we had a hard time stumping them. For sight they had to cover one eye, while their partner moved a penny around over a cup, then they decided when their partner should drop the penny in the cup according to their sight, this proved to be a little bit of a challenge. For touch, the students felt a mystery bag and needed to guess what was inside, this activity stumped them for sure. For the most part, the students enjoyed our icebreaker activities. 

The other groups had some great icebreaker activities as well. One group did a ball toss with the students and they got to ask and answer different questions. Another group did two truths and a lie and the last group created a maze for the marble to end up on the bottom.

Overall, I thought it was a great first night and all of the students seemed to be having fun at each station. All of the students were engaged and all of my peers got a taste of teaching. Now, over the next month we all need to gear up and get ready to teach our first lesson...let the excitement, stress, and anxiety begin!