10.24.13 Hands Up! The wave demo

So for our first time teaching at Tech Club at Morning Star Elementary, we got together with Trevor and Christina , the others from cohort 1, and we decided that the were going to do a lesson about the forest and we would do a lesson about the ocean and waves. John and I found a great lesson on National Geographic's page for kids. It taught how waves are formed and then what type of waves there are. It was a great site that had a lot of info and that is were we got our questions from that we asked the kids. It may have been a little too advanced for the kids that we were paired with however.

Many of the kids that we had in our groups were kindergarten through second grade. Because of this we had to rearrange our lesson for the day. Trevor and Christina do a nice job of showing them information, usually by a YouTube video and then having them do an activity right after, so we followed their lead. I think our lesson that we had originally thought out, to have the kids work  on this the National Geographic site and then do a little quiz, would have worked better for the third grades and up. The groups of students we had were younger and their attention spans were out the door, due mostly to the fact it was nice outside and it was after school.

We decided, quickly, to have them watch a Bill Nye video on waves. We only had them watch the first 8 mins  and then had them get onto Tux Paint. I wanted to see what they remember from the video so I had them draw a high pitch wave and a low pitch wave. There was a little girl named Anna who was a first grader but she was so, so smart. She recited much of what she had learned from either the video or what she new prior to us being there. A little boy named Ryan, who is a little bit scatter brained, needed a little more coxing to doing his work but we finally got everyone to draw the waves. Then John asked them make two additional types of waves they remembered from the video. Many had radio waves or waves on a pond. It was funny though because many of them drew waves that both John and I knew to be real ones, but they had drawn them only because it was all they could think of. To have them a little more involved, I also asked them to show me with their hands certain types of waves. By doing this, we were able have the kids be interactive and also work on their computers.

Overall I think we did pretty well. We had a couple occasions were I had to ask the kids to put their hands up or in their pockets so that they would listen to instruction and not play with their computers. It was pretty cool.

First Tech Club meeting 10.10.13

I know this is really late, but it is the first time I have had to get to my blog since yesterday.
Tech Club at Morning Star was great. I think it is going to be a really great experience. Trevor and Christina from cohort 1 did a great job with their lessons that they taught.
Trevor was in charge of teaching about the universe and Christina was teaching about volcanoes. I learned a lot not only from how the kids reacted to the lesson but also from the lesson it's self. It's amazing what you forget after third grade. The kids were a bit of a challenge because they were from ages k-3rd and some of the kinder gardeners didn't even know how to read. I know that we weren't supposed to interact but I ended up helping Trevor with his second group of kids with their questionaire that they were asked to do. I directed all big questions back to Trevor and had the kids address him for anything they needed but I sat with two little boys that were having trouble trying to figure out how to read the questions. It was interesting to see  how long their attention span was and what it was that kept them focused.
Trevor had a great lesson in mind, but I think because of the range of age levels, it was a little harder to have everyone concentrate on what they were supposed to be doing. Christina had a little better outcome because her volcanoes activity had the kids watch a Bill Nye video and then draw out the layers to a volcano.  I thought this covered all ages well and the students were able to expand on their drawings or keep to the basics.
My partner , John Cox, and I had alot of great insight from being able to observe Trevor and Christina. Our first time teaching will be on Halloween......... all I can say is, I'm bringing candy.