Adelaide Teaching
Saturday, February 13th, 2023
This Saturday, we had the chance to teach Adelaide students from grades 3 to 5 at the LCIS Upper Campus. To prepare for the the class, we planned out what activities we wanted to do for the lesson. Throughout our planning, we constantly kept in mind that our students are young. Therefore, we had to adjust the way we teach to suit the audience. This involved using more hands on and interactive activities like coloring and piecing together code blocks. During the lesson, we kept an energetic tone, trying our best to always interact with the kids instead of just lecturing them. We were also mindful of our language and used wording that younger kids would understand.
This Saturday, we had the chance to teach Adelaide students from grades 3 to 5 at the LCIS Upper Campus. To prepare for the the class, we planned out what activities we wanted to do for the lesson. Throughout our planning, we constantly kept in mind that our students are young. Therefore, we had to adjust the way we teach to suit the audience. This involved using more hands on and interactive activities like coloring and piecing together code blocks. During the lesson, we kept an energetic tone, trying our best to always interact with the kids instead of just lecturing them. We were also mindful of our language and used wording that younger kids would understand.
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Overall, we were able to stay on course with our planned activities and even altered some of them to better fit the kids. Our ability to adapt on the stop shows that we were able to work well as a team to overcome the challenges that we faced. Seeing the positive reactions from the students definitely reflected that they enjoyed the content we were teaching them. A few areas we are focusing on improving at the next lesson is our pacing, as sometimes we bombarded the students with a large amount of information in little time. Similarly, including more visual cues when discussing areas such as the scientific method would permit for a more comprehensive lesson. As we will be using technology the next time we work with them, finding ways to keep attention from the students will be extremely necessary in ensuring our coding explanations are reached. That being said, it was a wonderful experience that taught us the importance of adaptability, teamwork and collaboration. |
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Saturday, March 18th, 2023
On Saturday, we had our second lesson with the Adelaide students from grades 3 to 5 which was held at the LCIS lower campus this time. As we had more experience with teaching, our plan this time was more concrete. We took time to prepare for the class, planning out what activities we wanted to do for the lesson. The students had experience with coding prior to our lesson which influenced the activities we chose this time. But, we still kept in mind that our students are young and our activities have to reflect that. Thus, this time around we started off with a hands on activity (building paper towers) to get them active and interacting with their peers. Then we moved into more coding learning by getting them to do simple scratch activities that we planned prior to the lesson. Throughout the lesson, we tried to the kids to find the answer on their own instead of us just telling them. We also tried to physically act out the actions we wanted our avatars’ to do in the code to help the children understand what the code should accomplish. Overall, even though we had a small miscommunication at the beginning with the location of the lesson, we were able to stay on course with our planned activities. Our ability to overcome the challenges we faced and maintain a positive mood is a reflection of our strong teamwork and adaptability. Hearing the students say that they wanted to code definitely reflected that they enjoyed what we were teaching them and what we taught them before. |
A few areas we are focusing on improving for next time is in general being more confident in our teaching. Similarly, including more visual cues when discussing areas such as the scientific method would permit for a more comprehensive lesson. As we will be using technology the next time we work with them, finding ways to keep attention from the students will be extremely necessary in ensuring our coding explanations are reached. That being said, it was a wonderful experience that taught us the importance of adaptability, teamwork and collaboration. We look forward to participating in other coding activities in the future, both in relation to Adelaide and other teaching opportunities.
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