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.