Science
Science is a subject that needs to be hands on for students to grasp the true concepts. This is why I have planned four different field trips focused on Science as a way for my students to relate the concepts learned in the classroom to the real world. One specific field trip focused on plant life cycles and we traveled to the Lancetilla Botanical Gardens in Tela, Honduras (about 1.5 hours from La Ceiba). Here, students were able to locate the different stages of a plants life cycle, observe plants from all over the world, and spend a day in nature. I co-taught four mini-lessons with the third grade teacher throughout the day. Students were each given there own field trip booklet made especially for the trip for them to complete activities and take notes.
We also organized an Earth Day Beach Clean-Up as another field trip at a local beach just outside of La Ceiba. We taught the importance of our Earth and what we can do at home or at school that can help save our planet in the classroom. While we were at the beach, students used the knowledge they had learned to clean up the garbage in the area and to also make posters explaining simple things everyone can do at home to conserve water and electricity. As a way to finalize this trip, the third and fourth grade students worked together to paint a mural at our school to help visualize all of the work they had accomplished. Each student signed their name showing that they vow to keep their beaches clean.
We also do hands on experiments in the classroom throughout the school year to bring science closer to each student. While learning about states of matter, students completed a lab where they had to list the physical properties of an object and explain which state of matter it represented. Some of these objects represented more than one state. This was a critical thinking activity for students since they had to observe each object closely to decipher whether it was a solid, liquid, or a gas. They filled in the information found for each object in a table.