Lesson #3

In planning our lesson, we knew that we wanted to include a lesson with stations where smaller groups of students could learn different information about life in ancient Egypt. This would give us a good sense of how transitions work between stations. I certainly learned in this lesson how important it is to have everything prepared ahead of time in order to make transitions go smoothly. And once again, I have a lot to learn if I were to do stations with myself as the only teacher! Obviously, stations in general need to be introduced one at a time if they involve individual work without the teacher’s presence and guidance. Students need to demonstrate an ability to work independently before they can be entrusted to work away from the teacher. After this day’s lesson, I can imagine that this takes time and a lot of instruction!

I have realized with this lesson that even though a lot of preparation is entailed, stations are indeed an effective way to communicate a lot of information in one lesson. Stations give students the opportunity to investigate multiple aspects of a particular subject. In this case, students investigated the various inventions that came out of ancient Egypt. One station included a water clock demonstration, one involved going through the process of making construction paper papyrus, and one was a hieroglyphics riddle station. Once again, it was a luxury to be able to have three teachers involved! Mr. F. got students started on their individual hieroglyphics worksheets, I had a short presentation on water clocks, and Catherine R. talked with a small group about papyrus. Students were able to receive more individual attention and were able to participate more openly in discussions. I noticed students who don’t usually share in class piping up in conversation about the important of clocks in our lives. Having a smaller group also made it easier to go around in a circle and all share our answers and responses.

Again, with explicit instructions, and Mr. F.’s reinforcement, the students were able to successfully transition from station to station. We found turning out the lights to be especially efficient with these students as this is something they are very used to Mr. F. doing.

In reflecting back on this lesson, I am realizing just how much information we tried to cram into one lesson. I think we felt pressured to teach the students every aspect of ancient Egypt that we could. We felt like their knowledge of ancient Egypt was in our hands and that we had to cover everything we could in five lessons. I believe that instead we should have realized that content like ancient Egypt should be reinforced throughout the day and throughout the weeks to come. It is very likely that if we were actually teaching this class, we would have reinforced what they were learning about ancient Egypt through literature and on into the next unit on ancient China as well. We should have therefore narrowed our focus and our objectives a little more in planning our entire unit and especially this particular lesson. This is something I want to work on as a beginner teacher, realizing that while there is important content that I have to cover, sometimes less is more with teaching.

Lastly, I am disappointed to say that with all of the information we presented to the students on this day, it is hard to say whether or not they actually learned much from it. While Catherine R. and I did both comment on the fruitfulness of discussions within our small groups, we did not save enough time for any sort of assessment at the end and we did not create any sort of checklist to be able to account for each child actually learning the material. Perhaps we could have created a “Before you pass ‘Go’” card for each station where students would have to fill out a piece of information like an exit card in order to move on to the next station. This would have demonstrated to us what they students did and did not know after each station.