And Now, Introducing Minerals! Yay!!!

So this week my science partner Tracey and I introduced minerals to our 4th grade class and the students were even more excited than we were about them! There were 12 minerals in all, but we had the students focus on just the first 3; feldspar, quartz and pyrite. Because pyrite is toxic, we required the students to wear a plastic glove while holding all the minerals as a safety precaution, but unfortunately the plastic gloves caused a lot of sweaty hands! Other than that, I felt we had another fun and successful lesson for our little geologists!

Our professors observed our lesson and evaluated us this week based on Classroom Management, Process Skills, and Lesson Conclusion.

I felt our classroom management was a little off this week, but who knew hand-washing would throw such a kink in our lesson flow?! Having students wash their hands after using gloves while observing the minerals caused not only a traffic jam at the sink, students who were finished to be off-task, but it also wasted precious instructional time as well. Our classroom teacher suggested that next time the students either wash their hands after the lesson or not at all (since their hands were already gloved). The other issue seemed to be that our instructions were not simple or explicit enough and our classroom teacher had to interrupt a few times to remind students of what they should be doing. We thought we had really explained and modeled the directions clearly, but I think we need to simplify instructions a bit more and make them more step by step (rather than all at once).

For process skills we felt that we incorporated many process skills into the lesson including raising questions, predicting, hypothesizing, observation, investigation, interpreting evidence, and communicating/reflecting. What we learned is that we should have chosen just one of the skills to introduce to the students and explain and demonstrate it for them.

For our lesson conclusion we brought students back to the rug to discuss their observations of the 3 minerals and how they compared to the rocks we had previously observed, as well as their previous ideas about what a mineral was, and if they answered any of their own questions about minerals. Because hand-washing was so time consuming, we weren't able to read an excerpt about feldspar or take many student questions, but we asked students to try to think of some questions and bring them in next week.

The positive aspects of the lesson I felt were: the student's excitement and enthusiasm about minerals, our lesson planning and flow (other than the delay with hand-washing), keeping students on-task and engaged, and encouraging the use of science process skills (if not directly, but indirectly). Again I was impressed with student's prior knowledge about minerals and their observations were very impressive as well. Overall I'd say it was a good lesson that could have been a bit smoother had their not have been so many sweaty little hands and only one sink!