Field Day 6

Last Tuesday was the 100^th day of school in my field placement! The students did not have specific science lesson today, but the activities they did incorporated science, and showed me how as a teacher you can incorporate fun learning activities into celebrations! The students each brought in 100 items of whatever they wanted (for example 100 M&Ms, 100 Cheerios etc.) They sat in a circle and dumped their 100 things into a large bucket. Then, the students went to their tables and my CT and I gave each student a scoop of the now mixed up assortment of 100 items and put it on mat that they had each made with 10 boxes on it. The students had to sort their items so all of the cereal was in one pile, all the M&Ms were in one pile etc. Students who finished quickly went on to sort their already classified piles by color, shape, size, etc. The students really enjoyed doing this activity, and even though it was not a direct science lesson, it still helped to enhance their skills on sorting and classification, which can be applied to science lessons such as recycling. Having students work on these skills will be beneficial to other aspects of science, and will help them be able to thoroughly analyze, sort, classify and make sense of observations or data that they may come across in future science lessons. I think today’s activities can be applied to benchmarks such as: SCI I.1.E.5 Develop Strategies and skills for information gathering and problem solving. SCI I.1.E.6 Construct charts and graphs and prepare summaries of observations. If there was more time, students could have possibly made graphs of how many items of a certain color they had, or a certain shape for example. Placement this week taught me that there are other things that a teacher can do to include science, or math into a lesson while still celebrating special days with students.