Planting Cucumbers

Yesterday was our fifth science lesson, and I think we are getting so much better every single week which is a real morale booster!  This week, we really put everything together that we had been struggling with over the course of the last four weeks, and the smoothness of today's lesson showed that we had done this before.  There was a lot of content information that we had to teach in our introduction, so I was a little worried that the students would loose focus, but they surprisingly stayed on task very well.  I think it was helpful that we split the content information up into three distinct parts, and there was just enough transition in between each part to allow the students to regain their focus and keep their attention on the lesson.  Even something as simple as switching who is speaking or asking a question can allow the students more time to focus before loosing them.  It definitely helped that we had a question posed at the end of each section, which allowed the students a little thinking time and just enough transition to keep their attention focused on soil.

We began a long-term project planting cucumbers in different soil samples to see which type of soil will produce the healthiest plants.  We discussed what a healthy plant looks like, and that plants need water and minerals (just like we need food and water) in order to survive, and that the quality and quantity of soil has a tremendous effect on how much "food" the plants can get.  We watched a BrainPopJr. video on soil at the rug (which the students thought was fun), and then we began handing out the materials and the different samples of soil to each group. Students were paired up with the person sitting next to them, and each pair had two soil samples- one with local soil, and the second with either sand, clay, or humus depending on which group we assigned them to.  This way, everyone will have at least one healthy plant (the local soil), and they will be able to use the knowledge that they have gained over the last four weeks to determine why the sand and clay are not going to produce the healthiest plants (which they made predictions about today in their science journals).

I thought we did a great job incorporating technology into this week's lesson.  We had the students sit at the reading rug to watch the BrainPop video on my laptop, and after the students had drawn their initial observations of the plants and had written a description of what the samples looked like, we used the document camera to show some exemplary student work (which the students got really excited about!).  I think that by using the doc cam, we were able to get the students to work harder on their observations because they wanted to show the class their hard work, and it was a good way to use a little friendly competition in order to get the students to focus on doing their best work. 

We focused today's assessment on content writing, and we had the students write their predictions in their science journals as to which sample of soil they believe will produce the healthiest plant.  Alyssa and I walked around the classroom while the students were writing in their science journals to make sure they were staying on task, and then after the students planted their seeds, we handed out two worksheets in which they had to write their initial observations of each sample after the first day.  I think that by having the students write about what they are learning allows them to think through what they really want to say, and it gives them something to refer back to in a few weeks when the plants are grown so that they can see how much they have learned.  I'm glad that today's lesson went so smoothly, and it definitely gave me a boost of confidence seeing that the content information that we had to teach before planting the seeds was pretty complicated.  I thought it might have been a little more than they could handle, but the students did a great job listening and I thought we did a great job teaching the information.