Soil Lesson Number 2

Our second lesson on soil went just as smoothly as the first one.  Alyssa and I began the lesson by discussing what we had learned last week, and by asking the students what they had learned with Mrs. K during her lesson the week before.  The students had a lot of things to say about what they had learned, and it was a good way of transitioning into the next lesson.  We drew a KWL chart on the board, and filled the middle section in with the Key Questions for today's lesson, and we asked the students to share any questions they had come up with over the week (which we had asked them to write in their journals as they arose).  We introduced the three materials that we would be observing today, which were sand, clay, and humus, and then had a discussion about what the students knew about each material and where they had seen them before.  We showed a Brain Pop Jr. video to the class on soil, and since we already knew before the lesson that Mrs. K's projector did not work, we had the students join us at the reading rug so that we could all see the video play from my laptop (which worked out better than we had expected).
We did a good job managing our materials and distributing them to the class, but we had a little bit of trouble once again with the washing of their hands (same fancy gingerbread soap that the students couldn't get enough of last week).  The hand washing was less of an issue than it was last week because we were more orderly when getting the students to transition from one activity to the next, and we knew that one of us needed to stand at the soap line to keep the students on task and to get them back to their seats as quickly as possible.  Our lesson was connected to the Massachusetts Frameworks, and the students had an opportunity to write about what they had observed and to describe it using as many descriptive words as they could, like we had discussed in the beginning of the lesson.
I thought that Alyssa and I worked very well together again, and even though we had one student who was fooling around a bit, I thought we did a great job keeping the classroom interested and under control.  It was really funny that during last week's lesson, we were referring to humus as if it was pronounced the same way as the humus we eat with pita chips, and the students were all about correcting us as soon as we watched the Brain Pop Jr. video and realized what we were doing!  The students got a kick out of it, and told us that Mrs. Krauch had realized what we were doing last week and had already explained to them how to pronounce the word correctly, but she did not want to interrupt our lesson to do so, which was very thoughtful of her.  The students had a lot of fun again with the lesson, and were clearly very excited to have us back again.