Resource room activity

The fourth grade students in this video are quite a bit younger than the students I will be working with.

I like the opening activity in which the students generate words associated with the four seasons. This is usually a good "warm-up" strategy to engage prior knowledge. The teacher's incorporation of music was interesting: not something I would have thought of, and probably not something I would feel comfortable implementing, but the students seem to appreciate it and it is a good way to accomodate one of Gardiner's multiple intelligences.

The KWL is one of my favorite tools for organizing ideas. I use it often in my own lessons, and I was happy to see it used here.

It seemed that the students were doing a lot of paper and pencil coloring and plotting. I would suggest that the teacher try to recreate this using technology. She could have a digital image of the map of Missouri, which the students could divide into regions, color, and easily change/redo if necessary.

The weather portion of this lesson was either underdone or underrepresented in the video. The students should have been given access to the website and allowed to click around and explore, rather than just writing down what the teacher found. Also, I would like to know more about how they used Microsoft Excel to manipulate and represent their weather data.

My final comment is on the teacher's statement that the earth rocks back and forth as it revolves around the sun. I do not believe this to be accurate. I think the earth is tilted on its axis such that different parts of the earth are closer to the sun at different phases of the yearly revolution: this causes the seasons. There is some "wobbling" of the earth on its axis, (like a top). This motion is called "precession" it is the reason that the stars appear to be in different locations over the course of hundreds of years. But I think the teacher in this video was trying say that the "rocking" of the earth, back and forth on its axis is the cause of the seasons. Giving the students such a grand misconception of the motion of the earth is a great injustice and it really irritates me.