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.