Yet another day in the Wonderful World of Bugs has passed and once again, Amanda, Laura, and I are amazed at what our students are creating! Even though our field trip day was thwarted by three inches of snow, we were able to think on our toes and write an entirely new lesson on Friday, using what supplies we had. Since the planning stage, we have wanted to try learning centers with our students, which would be smaller exercises or “stations” that students would rotate between. We planned on students spending about 15-20 minutes at each center and then going to the next one, eventually getting to all four. Not all students got to every center as we intended, but all students were busy the entire time and seemed to enjoy what they were doing. The centers all focused on transformation and we used artists, Cindy Sherman and William Wegman to show students what transformation means (they really enjoyed William Wegman’s dog videos!) and we got a great response from Ava (below):
Monday, October 31, 2011
Plan B: Learning Centers
We were also curious to see how one of our students would react to these learning centers since, in the past, we have struggled when it comes to getting him to focus on one activity for an extended period. We did seem to notice an improvement in his behavior since he was doing multiple activities in shorter segments rather than one activity for 30-40 minutes like we usually do. Overall, the lesson was a great last minute substitution for what we had planned and it was a way for us to use our learning center ideas in class.
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I agree that trying out learning centers was a good idea. All the students seemed to be very involved in the centers. Some things to change if we do centers again would be toimprove the transitions between centers and simplify activities at each center. The activities seemed a little too involved and simplifying may allow us to be more involved as teachers rather than repeating the directions over and over. Overall I agree with Alice that the class was a success especially considering our last minute planning.
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