Final Flight....

This past Monday was our last lesson to teach the 2nd graders! It is very sad this has to come to an end, but overall it was a great experience! I have learned to be more confident, manage the class, do smooth transitions, expectations of 2nd graders and have learned a lot about butterflies! For out last lesson we decided to do a big wrap up of all the material and to do this we decided to incorporate literature. We read the students a story called, "Butterfly House," which is by Eve Bunting. This was a great story to use to wrap up the unit on butterflies, as it was about a young girl who found a caterpillar and took care of it til it became a Painted Lady Butterfly.

We used this story to introduce predictions and the different between that and a guess. I read the first page of the story and had the students write down their predictions of what was going to happen in the story. All of the students made great predictions and most all of them were accurate! After we read the whole story, we had the students fill out a "Butterfly Venn Diagram," comparing and contrasting the way the little girl in the story took care of her butterfly and the ways that their class took care of their caterpillars/butterflies. This activity went great, and it really gave the students an understanding that not all caterpillars live in little plastic cups; there are so many ways to take care of a caterpillar/butterfly.

During the second half of the lesson, we had the students fill out a worksheet (or you could call it a quiz)... This "quizypoo" was about the story we had just read to them but it was also a great review of many things we went over throughout the unit. That is why this book was so good... it really connected perfectly to what we had already taught the kiddo's!

So we had two different forms of assessment for that day, being the Butterfly Venn Diagram and the Butterfly House "Quiz." We could get a sense of the students understandings and comprehension levels. We also concentrated on differentiaiting instruction and we did this by making certain accomodations for students. We have two ELL students, so we are always constantly writing ideas and notes on the board for them and other students to see. We also have one student who excels in science, so he is always ahead of the class when working, so for this kiddo, we gave him the option to look through a couple of other butterfly books we had, while he waited for other students to finish up. Differentiating instruction can be an aspect of teaching that can be rather difficult. You may have some students who learn quickly and then you may have those few students who need more time to finish activities. As a teacher you need to be aware of these students and make sure they are always staying busy or making sure that they have enough time.

Overall the butterfly unit went great with our 2nd graders! We even got thank you cards for each individual student! And of course we gave our teacher and the class a thank you card as well for inviting us into their classroom and being such great students! =) We plan to visit back in January... we made a promise!