Engineering Lesson

For our lesson for the last week in the kindergarten classroom, Andrea, Samantha, Emily, Laine, and I decided to do a sinking vs. floating lesson and bring in a tub of water!  We gathered materials to create boats that would sink and boats that would float.  The children's job was to first create a boat that would be able to float on top of the water and then create one that would sink to the bottom. The children in our group were really excited about it and actually knew what floating and sinking meant. We used thumbs up for float and thumbs down for sink to give them some gestures to go along with the vocabulary.  Some of the children even used Spanish to tell us sinking meant that the boat would go under.  When Andrea asked the children what sinking meant, Jennifer said the Spanish word for under.  Luckily for me, I knew what that word was so I was able to solidify that she was correct with what she was saying.  She also used a gesture with saying that, so I think that helped everyone else with understanding what she was trying to say.  If a child had said a word I was not familiar with in Spanish, I would have been confused as to how to respond to the answer, just as I had been confused during my sense of touch lesson with the students.  I would not know how to respond to a child’s answer I was not sure of because if they were correct but in a different language so I didn’t understand them and told them they were wrong, it would create more gaps in their academics.  This is something I think I will forever struggle with because there are so many different languages around and it is impossible to learn them all.

I think that getting to work closely with the students during this lesson was not beneficial in me getting closer to my goals.  My goals are to become more comfortable in a diverse classroom and to be able to communicate with all of the students.  Since there were five teachers to four students in our group, it was extremely difficult to get to interact with the students more than one at a time.  The teacher to student ratio was just too high to get any time to instruct the children besides being right next to them. I did not get many opportunities to explicitly teach them anything because one teacher would say one thing and then we all built off of it.  I was interacting mostly with a little boy.  While he was building his boat, I asked him questions like “Do you think that will help it float or sink?” and “What else do you think your boat needs in order to float?”  Even though our materials were mainly for the children to figure out how to make the boat float, he thought it needed a ‘flag’ and a ‘light’ on top of the straw.  This showed me that he has made a connection to a boat that he had seen prior to this lesson because we did not show him an image of a boat or give them any guidelines as to how to construct their boats besides making them sink or float.