Preparing for Fieldwork

It is time that we start preparing for fieldwork! Since I am part of the first group we will be teaching first! We are going to be teaching a 6th grade science class. I am a little nervous about teaching 6th grade! My groups topic is properties of minerals and classifying rocks. I know this is not the most exciting topic to cover, so my group and I are trying to plan fun activities that will engage the
students as they learn.

While planning our lessons, we have to keep in mind ways that will grasp the students attention. We have to think about what students enjoy and how we can incorporate that into our lesson plans. On our first day of fieldwork, we are going to get to know the students better. Hopefully we can learn more about them, what they enjoy and what they like about science. We can use this to gear our lessons towards the interests of the students. It is very important for the students to be able to connect with the lessons to make it more fun, relatable and worth while.

During our lessons we also need to think of ways to track students progress and understanding. This can be done through assessments. We need to plan diagnostic, formative and summative assessments. We as teachers need to assess students before our lessons, during and after. We can assess the students before our lessons by giving them a pretest and after the lessons by giving them a post test. Throughout the lessons we can assess students informally. Informal assessments are very important and can be done multiple ways. One way this can be done is asking questions and having students respond by put a thumbs up in the air if they agree or a thumbs down if they disagree. There are many different ways to informally assess students during our lessons that will help us to see if the students are grasping the information we are teaching them.