Finally after all of the hard work and research, we got to conduct our lesson at the water fair! I was extremely excited because it’s something I spent the entire semester working towards. I’m glad I prepared my cups with holes and soil in them beforehand, because that would be stressful and difficult to do in such a short amount of time. Having a table cloth or multiple paper towels prepared in advance would have also been useful since especially with the wet soil, leaves, and pouring water into cups. Scooping out the dry soil also created a small mess on the table, but it was easily cleaned up at the end.
The students I was teaching the lesson got to scoop soil, pour water, hold cups, add rocks and leaves, and make observations throughout the lesson. The students were very eager to participate, and were ready to get hands on with the materials. It may be difficult to do this with a group of over six students at a time due to distractions.
An active learning method that I used while conducting this lesson was active recall. I began by quizzing the students on the vocabulary we had discussed. For example, when I pointed to Cup C, which contained the excess water that drained from Cup A, the students correctly identified this collected water as runoff. This demonstrated the importance of annotating and using key vocabulary throughout the experiment, followed by active recall, to ensure students truly understood the lesson. Overall, I really enjoyed teaching this lesson at JJK. It was an engaging and meaningful experience that gave me valuable insight into working with students.