I haven’t been doing much teaching in my placement, instead observing, assisting, and occasionally planning and implementing activities into my mentor teacher’s lessons.
On Monday, I had planned an activity that used “trading cards” of celestial bodies to teach about classification. The activity was initially planned as a way to introduce the classification scheme for celestial bodies, but my mentor teacher had given a lecture on that the previous Friday. I, instead, modified my activity to still include the classification, but to also work as an assessment, where students had to match the cards to the classification schemes they had already learned.
This was very engaging, particularly for students who are typically disengaged, because of the tactile component of it. Students were given 20 cards with a celestial body’s name and image on one side and a few facts on the back (radius, distance from sun, what it is made of, etc). Instead of looking at pictures on a powerpoint slide, the physically manipulated the trading cards, allowing them to create meaning by developing their own classification scheme, asking guiding questions that led them to think about the usefulness/purpose of classification, and then assessing their abilities to classify based on the scheme used by scientists.
The first page of the worksheet was the initial activity, but I had added a second page for this formative assessment of students’ ability to classify bodies into stars, planets, dwarf planets, asteroids, and comets. Some groups of students had started to make the connection before they turned to the second page, and others had come up with their own, different classification schemes that they had to rethink.
I was really happy with this activity and am looking into adapting it to other parts of this class (classification of galaxies, having students create their own constellation stories). While I know they learned because they were able to successfully classify independently, I was most pleased by the engagement of the students. All students worked diligently and on task for the entire activity, no students questioned why we were doing it, and I had no issues with classroom management. This activity, being well planned and research based (I adapted it from NASA), gave me a good teaching day.
