Preparation and Teaching

In order to prepare for our activity, we needed to gain some knowledge about our topic beforehand. We were taught information about our topic and were given an activity that we could build our lesson around. We had the activity planned out, so now we just needed to add some more information to our lesson. We came up with the idea of a poster to show the different parts of the watershed and added a little activity to that. We would have the 4th graders come up and place sticky notes with the names of parts of the watershed onto the unlabeled poster. We had our activities and lesson information, so now we just needed to come up with an order that would allow the lesson to flow well. We decided that we should start with the poster activity to get the 4th graders thinking, and then teach them about the different parts of the watershed that they were confused about and give them a general idea of what is in a watershed and how they work. We then would do the crumbled paper / coloring activity to show them how watersheds work and how the water can interact with the unique landscapes of their watersheds. After we squirted their watershed models with water, we asked them what they noticed and what the different blending colors means. Many of them did this correct and we were able to make this activity fun and educational. To conclude our lesson, we would compare watersheds to a bowl of soup and create analogies that linked the different parts of the watershed as things you'd find in soup, a common item that they've all encountered and could easily visualize.

The first day went really well despite missing one group member. The poster idea worked well because it got the kids engaged and ready to learn and appeared to make them excited to learn about watersheds. They also seemed to enjoy the watershed activity. We had Marcus do the steps of the project with them so they wouldn't get confused and they could see how their watershed should look after each step. They also liked how we sprayed water onto their watershed models and it got them really engaged. The 4th graders also really liked the soup bowl analogy and we could tell they payed a lot of attention in that section of our lesson. If we finished before they had to rotate, we would tell them about other service projects students have done and how many things they see in the garden have been made possible by students. They seemed really intrigued to learn about how so many things were made by students here. This project was just as fun as it was in the first semester, even though it wasn't about the chickens this time.