Well, this adventure in third grade science is over and a lifetime of teaching awaits! We wrapped up our unit with a very exciting jeopardy game. We split the class into two teams and they competed against each other for science pride. We had categories like science process skills, science tools, science vocabulary, and science experiments. The students did and amazing job and it was evident that they learned a lot in this unit. They were able to answer all but one of the jeopardy questions. The game cam down to the big double jeopardy questions at the end to determine the winner. The students loved this game and it was a great way to assess their learning for us! This experience teaching our changes unit in the third grade has been invaluable. It was a pleasure getting to know the students and help spark their curiosity of science and build their foundation of science concepts. I feel like I learned so much from the teacher, the students, as well as my teaching partner Debi about teaching science. I have learned and grown so much and my confidence in teaching has grown by leaps and bounds. I feel like have been given the knowledge and the tools necessary to take on any classroom and have success. After this experience I feel as though I am way more confident and prepared to have my own classroom. I am now aware of how important planning and preparation are to successful lessons. I am also more aware of how important good classroom management techniques are to a successful learning environment. Most importantly I learned that for students to retain and learn from they need to be motivated and excited. It is our job as teachers to not only provide the concepts and the tools for our students, but to excite them and motivate them to succeed. The more memorable you can make each day the more likely they will learn what you are trying to teach.
I am very thankful to my teaching partner Debi for working so hard with me to teach our changes unit to our students. We were a great team and because of this teamwork we had a very successful semester. We put in a tremendous amount of work each week and it all paid off in our final lesson when we played solids, liquids and gases jeopardy with our students and they shocked us with how much they learned throughout the unit and how excited they were about their new knowledge. I am also very grateful for the feedback from our supervisors during this experience. Each week I felt like I grew more confident and became a better teacher with the constructive criticism that I received from our observers. This feedback helped me see myself from an outside looking in perspective and recognize areas that I need to focus on in future lessons. Furthermore, the teacher we worked with was very helpful and supportive during this whole unit. She helped us with classroom management and useful ways to get the kids to quite down and focus on the task at hand. We found the "thumbs up" method especially helpful to keep the students attention on the task at hand and to move the lesson along at an appropriate pace. She was also very helpful in showing us just how motivating and fun hands on learning can be, especially in science.I am also a lot more confident in solids, liquids and gases than I was before this experiment. I would be very confident in moving forward and teaching this lesson again. I often times had to go home and research more about this content area because the students came up with so many great questions and I wanted to be an expert. This also taught me to be on your toes as a teacher and that content knowledge is very important. The students will come up with a question that will leave you feeling stumped. 
I have also learned that teaching science cannot be successful without teaching process skills. The students needs to know that science is all about asking questions and then searching for answers. In this search they will use a wealth of process skills from observation to classification. Our students used many different process skills each week and I was pleasantly surprised at the end of the unit that they understood and new how we used all of their process skills! Yay Success!! The only thing I can say about doing this again is maybe setting up a time when the teacher has some free time to talk with us before we begin the unit. We had only a few short minutes to talk with the classroom teacher upon our first visit and she was very busy. It would be helpful to have a little more time to touch base with her and discuss the classroom dynamic, get to know some kids names, and learn the teachers expectations for the lessons. Other than that this experience was awesome! It taught me more than sitting in a classroom at the university could ever teach.
Overall I have learned from this experience that teaching science is challenging and very fun. It brings with it inquiry and excitement. If you share this excitement with your students you will be successful. The more they are curious and excited the harder they work and the more value the lesson will have in their lives. It was very sad to say goodbye to the students. As they handed us cards and gave us hugs i just wanted to stay with them forever. What will stay with me forever is that I made a difference in their educational lives. They learned a lot from me and I learned a lot for them. I really enjoyed writing this blog for our science teaching. I have always enjoyed keeping journals of my life experience and blogging is a great way to share experiences with others. I feel like this blog was a great way to help me reflect on my teaching and how to improve future lessons. I also enjoyed reading the blogs of my fellow classmates. I felt like it gave me a connection to my classmates and helped me learn from their techniques and experiences. Blogging was a great way to share with each other and created a network of support
THANKS FOR A GREAT SEMESTER EVERYONE!!
