Lesson #1 - 11/9/06

Today Marianne and I taught our first lesson to the first grade class. We taught a lesson on nocturnal and diurnal animals. The students have been studying animals, and are getting ready to finish up that unit. The teacher had mentioned in our planning that she usually likes to include nocturnal/diurnal in the animal unit, but was not going to have time, so we took it on.
We used our time to discuss animals and their habits for a few minutes and determined what they already knew. A few of the students were familiar with the term nocturnal, but did not know the term diurnal. We did an interactive read aloud of a book on this concept, reviewed various animals, determining whether they are nocturnal or diurnal, and had the students create two murals using animals prints we gave them.
Overall, I think the lesson went well. I will be interested to receive some feedback from the teacher when we can meet with her. Prior to the reading, Marianne took some time to hear about the class rules of read alouds from the children themselves. I think this was a great way to start the lesson and remind the kids that the rules are the same even if we are teaching the lesson. They really enjoyed having some time to color and cut their animals out. I think that this activity was a good way to break up the lesson and give them time to move around. The students went back to their desk for this. While they were coloring, Marianne and I each visited with each student to help them determine whether their animal was nocturnal or diurnal. This worked well to give us time to evaluate if all students had understood. We were able to reinforce the idea and ask them questions individually. The repetition seemed to help them grasp the concept as well. The class was able to work well together creating the murals, and all the students were excited to help create the background of the murals.
There were a few parts of the lesson that I might have changed if I were re-teaching this lesson. I think that we could have made the book more interactive, asking more questions while we were reading. While the book is not very long, students struggled a little bit not to talk. We could have also tried to reinforce the idea that we would take questions, not hear stories during the reading. I'm not sure this would have helped since they were very excited to tell us everything they saw in each picture and any story that related to the animal we were reading about. I also think that I might have used the worksheet differently. We gave them a page with all the animals we were handing out on it. Underneath the small picture is a clue about whether the animal is nocturnal or diurnal. We read this with them. Some students followed along, but others seemed distracted by having the paper in front of them. I might have waited to hand it out until after our discussion or tried to use it in small groups, rather than with the whole class. Lastly, we began by using the terms awake and asleep to describe the terms, but as the lesson progressed, we found that they understood better when we used awake for both terms. We began teaching nocturnal starts with 'n', so those animals are awake at night and diurnal starts with 'd' and those animals are awake during the day. I wish we had put this phrase together for them in the beginning of the lesson. I found myself stating that nocturnal animals were awake at night and asleep during the day, which was a lot to think about at once.
The only other thing I had trouble with was knowing the best way to tell a child when their answer was incorrect. I was able to do so, and usually just kept with that student and continued the discussion until the correct answer was produced, but I am still feeling a little bit unsure about how to tell a student they are wrong while being supportive. I think that this is easier with some types of answers, but not others. I will need to work on this.