Lesson Plan #4/Observation

Lesson Plan:
I figured for today's lesson plan that I would actually just reuse the one I wrote last week for week three because I didn't get to use it and it's now closer to the Thanksgiving holidays I have printed out sheets of paper and have labeled each one with the appropriate Native American Tribe. Each student will pick whichever tribe they want and Google search the tribe and I want them to tell me something unique about the tribe they have chosen. We can look at the differences each student finds and maybe some tribes will have similarities as well. I have a list of cool Native American facts from Montana that I plan on sharing with them. Additionally I am going into the school early and am going to look for a short story to read them if the time allows. Michael suggested that would be a good strategy if they are being rowdy for some reason because they know when someone is reading to them to listen. I want to make this lesson plan very oriented toward Thanksgiving because its a holiday that traditionally holds a lot of history with it and it's important to recognize the history.

Observation:
We used Tressa's lesson plan today and took them to a website called Melody Street where it teaches them virtually about music and sounds relevant to music. Knowing how to play music or kids that play instruments generally have an easier time in school because music is challenging to learn. I thought that this lesson plan was interesting in that sense, what I noticed is the students who previously played an instrument seem to have a better grasp even with the technology aspect. I just noticed when I was walking around asking the students if they played instruments and the ones that had generally had a better grasp of how to navigate the computers. It was a cool correlation to see on my own but hopefully that lesson plan got some of them excited and wanting to play music. We also let them experiment with Garage Band if they wanted to after using Melody Street website. Generally Garage Band is difficult to navigate but has the same purpose of letting their creative sides come out. The students that chose to use Garage Band struggled with using the program at first, but after about 10 minutes they were helping each other to use it, which is cool to see peer helping peer before the teacher. It seems like the students get it better when one of their own peers explains something to them opposed to the instructor. This was supposed to be our last week, however Tressa needs to do one more so I am planning on going next Thursday also so she doesn't have to teach all by herself with the kids. The class size we received this week was much more manageable than the previous week, we had about 7 or 8 less students but still had over 10 this week which seemed to be a better number of kids and they were less wild.  

Lesson Plan #3/Observation

Today I thought that I had the ability to design a lesson plan about Indian Education since it is one of the standards in every year of school in Montana. What I did is printed out sheets of paper with 9 of the Native American tribes and I am going to ask each student to Google which ever one they want and find a picture of traditional Indian headdress and then compare the pictures next week with the rest of the class. I think this would show them that each tribe is classified as Native American but the tribes themselves differ tremendously throughout the state. To continue this additionally next week I want them to remember which tribe they choose and I want them to find something unique that is solely an example of each tribes individuality. I think this addresses the stereotypes as well that they all have the same problems and Natives are one homogeneous group of people which is completely false. This plan should work for either groups of students whether they are K-2 or 3-5 which is one of the things I am figuring out is going to be hard to design lesson plans that will be effective for all age groups.

We ended up using Tressa's lesson plan for tech club which was a interesting website that had educational video's. It ended up being a pretty productive day in the tech club the first day that there weren't any huge surprises. Although we ended up having about 24 students in the tech club that day so it was hard to help everyone. I would have appreciated if we only had 8 to 10 kids per session because it was very hectic and loud with all of them. I had to raise my voice multiple times and count down from five on my hand to get them to be quiet. Sometimes I feel as though it is hard at Whittier because we get a different group of kids each time and I know other group that were continuing lesson plans from week to week and it is simply too hard to do that at Whittier with the differences in our groups and age groups weekly. Although the lesson plans once we get the kids up and running on them are liking it quite a bit, I wanted to do something with Google Earth next week but when I checked to see if they had the program they didn't and I would have to download it. We'll figure out something fun for next week probably with a Thanksgiving theme.