Teachable Moments

Homes for the Environment SS Lesson
First graders learn about natural resources being used for building homes.

1. Short Term Learning Targets/Objective(s) for This Lesson: Students will be able to create a poster of an appropriate home for the environment they were given while working with a small group and share these findings with the class.
For this lesson students are put into groups of five and are given pictures of an environment such as a snowy field or tropical island. They must as a group design a home on a poster and then share it with the class.

2. I could tell that they really made the connection between what an environment has to offer and the type of home that could come from that area because of the posters they created. I was really impressed with the thinking they were doing. As I was walking around during the group work they were looking at their reading book and talking about what kinds of homes could work in their environment and why.

3. I immediately could see the need for a reteach because when we got to the sharing portion of the lesson it did not go very well. This was our first attempt at sharing as a group in front of the class and they were really wound up and did not want to settle down after the excitement of working together. During the share time many students were running around and waving their papers or discussing what they were going to do when they got up to share. I think many of them thought that each group was just presenting to me and they were not expected to listen. I could see right away that one they needed more time to wrap it up and plan their presentation and two they needed modeling and guiding on how to present both as a presenter and as an audience.

The next morning I talked to them after morning meeting about the hard work they did on their posters and how impressed I was with their homes that they built. I said I was concerned that they might have been busy doing other things and hadn't had a chance to hear about what their other classmates did to create their homes. We then went over audience expectations and I had all of the papers up front with me. I called them up one group at a time and assigned who would hold what and then asked them specific questions about what happened in their group and the home they made. This "redo" went a lot better and I could tell that they were really interested in what their classmates had done. I think everyone was very proud of what they had made after they had the chance to be recognized and applauded for.

4. Possible extension activities that I could do for this lesson are to add a writing element that could go up with their poster in the room. Each student could do their own writing or they could compose a paragraph as a group. I could also ask each group to design two possible homes or have them as an independent activity design another home that their group did not choose to do. One extension that I did do was to ask further questions about the home they designed such as specific building materials on different parts of the house and asking why they thought a certain shape of roof or type of door was better for their environment.

Overall it was a fun lesson and I would definitely do it again with another class.