Week 9 Reflection

     This week I started teaching science. I do not have much experience teaching science and was a little intimidated by this subject. I also feel like there are so many things to think about with science after the methods course I took, that I am worried I will forget an aspect or contributing factor that could really help my students to better understand the concept. As I planned my lessons for basic animal needs, I started to get excited about the lessons. I realized that science has so many resources, hands on opportunities, art integrated areas, and a great ability to connect to real life of my students. I plan a class discussion for many of my lessons as I really feel open discussion is beneficial for student confidence, student informal pre-assessment, and collaboration. After leading a class discussion on science with my students, I realized that they were very excited to share what they know about science. The students are confident in their random fact knowledge and observational abilities. I have not gotten as much out of my students in whole class discussion than I did from this science discussion. I'm not sure if they were so excited because the discussion was about animals, or because they are excited about science, however, a majority of my students are often trying to share random bits of information and findings throughout the day.
     So far, I have taught four science lessons and have already integrated art, technology, small group collaboration, open discussion, journaling, note taking, and hands on experience. It was surprisingly easy to include so many methods, tools, and assessment formats with science. After only one week of teaching science, my confidence in the subject has increased dramatically. I have realized that the only area I feel uneasy about teaching now is Mathematics. I believe the reason this is such a difficult area for me to teach is because math comes easy to me and therefore it is more difficult to explain. The lessons that I have to work harder to understand like social studies and science are easy to teach to students as I am teaching myself.
     I am starting my exercise inclusion for my inquiry topic next week and I may make changes to the schedule to include some exercise activities prior to science later in the day. I feel it would be easy to include exercise in science as it integrates with so many things fairly easily. I do not know if this would relate to the goal or main interest topic of my study. It might be a good idea to integrate exercise multiple times throughout the day rather than just once in the morning three times a week.