Micro-teaching Lesson Plan

1.      Learners – kindergarten

2.      Learning Outcomes – students will be able to recognize and identify specific shapes

3.      Assessment – Students will be given a worksheet where they will be required to identify specific shapes and color them.

Activity

1.      I will begin by asking the students to tell me some shapes that they know, and I will draw and label them on the smartboard. Next, I will ask them where they see these shapes during the day. I will then show The Shape Song

2.      Next I will demonstrate the differences of triangles, squares, circles, pentagons, and an octagon. By using GeoBoard I can efficiently demonstrate the sides and point of a shape. As I teach, the students will follow along on pages with the shapes, and they will trace the edges in one color and the points with another.

3.      For individual assessment, I will give each student the attached worksheet where students will be required to recognize and identify a given shape.

4.      Reflection

a.       How well the use of this technology may support your teaching strategies in this activity? By using the “The Shape Song,” I can appeal to the student’s visual and auditory needs through the fun pictures and catchy beat. Also, by using Geoboard.com, students can take home a resource where they can practice their shapes. Geoboard also gives an opening to appeal to kinesthetic learners.

b.      How effectively the use of this technology may enhance student’s understanding of and learning from your particular content in this activity? I do think that the technology is effective. However, I could have demonstrated the use of the Geoboard better to the students.

c.       What are your strategies and why do you think your strategies are appropriate to teaching this specific content?  What makes you believe it would help your students comprehend this particular content? I think the use of tracing the shapes as we learn about sides and corners is appropriate for Kindergarten age students because they are so hands-on already. With these young students, a teacher cannot expect them to sit still and listen to a lecture, and that is why I had them come to the board and help me, along with keeping their hands busy on the pages.

d.      What would be some conceptions and pre-conceptions that students of different ages and backgrounds bring with them when learning this particular content? What would you be concerned about students' prior knowledge, experiences, motivation? While some students may be exposed to the world of shapes, many children are not. During this lesson, I asked the students to show me what shapes they already knew and if they knew what they were called. Most of the students thought of circles, rectangles, and squares. These are the most basic shapes that we see every day, and yet there could be students who do not have a connection to those shapes to think back to.

e.       What main instructional strategies would this technology use serve in your activity? How would using the technology support the way you teach this activity? Please give examples and be specific to your described activity. Think about your main teaching strategies that this technology would support. Because the students are so young and have short attention spans, I needed something that could bring their attention back to me every few minutes. Like with the video, I would stop it and have the find shapes before playing it again. Also, when drawing on the SmartBoard, I was using the students as helpers which would also bring their attention back to me.

f.       What different classroom management strategies you might need to consider when using this technology in the activity? Give examples and be specific to your described activity. Because the Geoboard could have also been used on iPads, I could have given each student his or her own. If this would have happened, then I would need to pay closer attention to the students, and walked around the classroom more to monitor their activity. Also, because we were using markers, I would need to be sure to monitor the students to be sure they were only marking on the papers.

g.      How would using this technology enhance the way the content is represented in your activity (e.g. demonstrations, explanations, examples, illustrations, analogies, and etc.)? That is why you think the selection and the pedagogical use of this technology may enhance what you teach (the content in your activity). Give specific examples from your activity to support your answer and keep in mind the learning objectives that you stated previously. By using “The Shape Song” on YouTube, it gave real-life illustrations of where certain shapes might be. This increased the real-world applications that students could take out of the classroom and use. Also, by using the Smartboard for drawing the shapes, students where gaining muscle memory for drawing shapes.

h.      In what different ways students practice or understand the content in your activity that would otherwise not be possible without the use of the technology? In addition to motivational benefits, what else can students do with this technology as they are learning the content? One thing about using YouTube, is that there are hundreds of videos over one topic, and that includes shapes. There are multiple “shape songs” that the students can watch at home to get better acquainted with shapes. With YouTube, the students can be exposed to many more different shapes than I can cover in one class period. Also, because GeoBoard can be used in an app or on the web, students can have access to shape practice wherever they go.