Engineering Lesson

Last Tuesday, December 2nd, I presented my engineering lesson with my group members. We taught to a very small group of Kindergarteners about floating vs. sinking. We introduced the lesson by referring to the tub of water we had in front of us, and told them we were going to make our own boats to test whether they would float or sink. We had a table of recycled materials that the students were able to utilize to make their own boats. What really surprised me most about this lesson was how excited and engaged the students were without us having to prompt them. There was one student in particular that showed her enthusiasm for the project with a constant smile and excited gasps. It was clear to all of the co-teachers that this student was really excited about the content, which was really motivating for us.

Overall, the lesson went okay in my opinion. Each of the students were able to successfully tell us what the difference between sinking and floating was at the end of the lesson. Each of the students created a boat. While some floated and some ended up sinking, the students were still able to have a great learning experience and were able to correct their boats by taking off or adding more materials so they would be able to float. We went around in a circle and the students loved being able to test their own boat in front of the rest of the group.

The aspect of this lesson implementation that I wish could have gone differently was the student to teacher ratio. It was really hard to get any individual instruction in, since there were more teachers than there were students. I think it kind of threw the children off as well because one of the students asked when they first got to our station, “Why so many teachers?” It took a while for the students to recognize that we were all in charge of the teaching because they were hesitant to answer our introduction questions for the first few minutes of the lesson. The flow of the lesson took a while to get going because of the awkward setup with 5 teachers and 4 students. A way we could have prevented this awkwardness would be if we had decided beforehand which teachers were going to say what––if we would have created an informal script. 

We learned through this lesson the importance of have extension activities in case the lesson ends early and there’s extra time that needs to be filled. We ended the lesson about 10 minutes early and were able to make use of the extra time by having the students draw a picture of their favorite boats that they saw or created during the lesson. They were able to draw some pretty detailed drawings and were then able to describe them to us individually as we went around the table. Had we not had anything planned as an extension, we could have been spending a lot of time twiddling our thumbs searching for something ti fill the remaining time.