Natural Phenomena That Change the Earth's Surface

The Lesson

This two day lesson was an integration of Science and Theatre Arts. The first day was spent on the science portion as students were divided into small groups (that I created prior to the lesson) to and assigned a natural phenomenon to become "experts" on, a SDAIE strategy known as Jigsaw. The second day was spent creating scripts and then acting out each natural phenomenon for the class. The class also created a rubric together to informally evaluate each other's performances with. The students had experience with Reader's Theatre in the past but have never written their own scripts to perform before. They had a great time with their performances!

Reflection

I actually thought the lesson went better than I had expected. I was fortunate that three of my fellow student teachers came to observe my lesson so I put them to good use by having them help me demonstrate acting out a tornado as a model for the class. I remember during my pre-planning conference with my Master Teacher, we were both unsure about how the students would write scripts for some of the more difficult natural phenomena like creep, dunes, and glaciers. But the students were able to figure something out which I was surprised about but very proud of them because it showed me that they were really working their creative gears.

Something I would change if I were to teach this lesson again was the grouping. Although I did use strategic grouping to form the groups, the groups were somewhat big for the task that was bestowed on them. My original thought was that I would need only six groups because there are only six sections in the text. However, it wouldn’t have done any harm to create smaller groups and assign two groups the same section. In fact, it would allow students to see that there are different ways to act out one thing. So I would definitely have created smaller groups of maybe three or four rather than groups of six so that the group could work more collaboratively on writing and acting out the script.