I am currently wrapping up my Pre-Internship Practicum (PIP) semester with my university. I am placed in a first grade classroom two full days a week with a wonderful mentoring teacher! This semester is really designed for you to get a feel of what it's like to be a teacher before you start student teaching. This fall, I will student teach full time and I can't wait!
As a part of the PIP, I was required to teach two formal lessons in each core subject area: math, science, language arts, and social studies. Last week, I taught my last lesson for my first graders. It was an integrated lesson over the three main types of clouds combining science, literacy, and a little math. I broke it into two days because there was so much to explore and learn!
I am so proud of how well my kiddos did during this lesson, so I wanted to share it here!
Day One:
- First, we read two books: Clouds by Marion Dane Bauer and The Cloud Book by Tomie dePaola. I skipped a few pages in the dePaola book that contained information about the subtypes of the three main types of clouds. I didn't want to overload the kids with information!
- As we read both books, we looked for the terms cirrus, cumulus, and stratus. We wrote the words on our whiteboard as well as some adjectives to go with each word.
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| Excuse the *fun fact* on the bottom! It was from our morning message, and the kids didn't want me to erase it :) |
- Next, we went outside to observe the clouds in the sky. I had the students write and draw their observations in their journals. I'm sad I didn't take pictures during this!
Day Two:
- We picked up where we left off by having a review discussion over the three types of clouds. I wrote down the students' responses on the whiteboard. I was surprised how well the kids remembered everything! After a little discussion, I displayed a picture of our whiteboard from yesterday on the SmartBoard for easy reference.
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| Just a little review to get our minds going! |
- I told the kids to picture the clouds we saw yesterday in their minds. Were they fluffy? Wispy? Big? Small?
- I showed the kids three banners around the room. Each banner contained the name of one of the types of clouds we had been learning about. I gave each child a sticky note and told them to place it on the banner they believed represented the cloud they saw outside yesterday.
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| The majority of the students chose cirrus, which was indeed the type of cloud we saw yesterday! |
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| 6 students chose stratus. This one seems to be the one with the most misconceptions. |
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| 2 students chose cumulus. |
- We counted the sticky notes up in tallies and discussed how many more, less, etc. for each banner. That was my tiny math integration!
- Finally, we began my favorite part of the lesson: the cloud flip book craftivity! I saw this cute freebie on Dragonflies in First and just had to try it! Thanks, Traci!
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| The kids loved these flip books! |
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| A pretty great example of a cirrus cloud! |
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| The cumulus clouds were the easiest to make :) |
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| The cutout cloud descriptions were wonderful and helped us create our clouds accurately. |
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| I loved seeing the kiddos' favorite clouds! They had so much fun with this! |
- The flip books did not take the kids too long to complete. I had already made the flip books before teaching the lesson, so all the kids did was label each tab, cut and glue the cloud descriptions, and glue the cotton ball clouds down! I would have loved to let the kids color their flip books for a little more personalization, but we didn't due to time constraints.
This lesson was so fun for me to share with my first graders. Integrated lessons always take me longer to plan and teach, but I think all the work was worth it! One of the best moments of the day was when I was walking the students to specials later in the day. A bunch of the kids were pointing up at the sky saying, "Look, Miss Meyer! It's a cumulus cloud!" I was SO PROUD! :)
Wow, what a long post! Now it's time to enjoy this beautiful Friday.
Hilary
