7/18 More Visitors and Teaching a Class

 This week had a few surprise guests alongside some more experience around teaching kids. Aside from that, this week featured many of the same setups familiar to those who have been keeping up with the blog posts here.

Pepper the Possum
Our guests featured an archeologist and a visit from the Oakland Nature Preserve. In the archeological lesson, the kids learned about the difficulties of excavating artifacts by trying to carve chocolate chips out of chocolate chip cookies without breaking the cookie too much. The kids also got to look and learn about where archeologists like to look for potential artifacts. The Oakland visitor had a very similar visit to a previous guest. She brought 4 animals for the kids learn about such as a tiger salamander, corn snake, and box turtle. The highlight for the kids was Pepper the Possum. She serves as an ambassador for wild animals taken as pets by people. The possum is believed to have been taken as a baby from the wild. After a year though, the possum seemed to have been released and left unable to survive in the wild. The kids got to pet Pepper at the end and learn why it is important to leave wild animals alone.


Me teaching a class.
For my teaching lesson, I was originally scheduled to teach two lessons this week, but some scheduling issues with the guest visitors meant I only got to teach one class this week, but I have taught a couple other ones before this class. With this activity, the kids were tasked with taking dinosaurs out of "amber" slime. I taught the kids about what amber is and how bugs got caught in it. Then, I told the kids what bugs caught in amber slime can teach us about the ancient past. After teaching a couple classes at the summer camp, one area I found I needed to improve in is fluffing up the existing lesson plan. The lesson plans and provided slides only provide enough information to teach about 10 minutes of the class. This can be a problem in classes like the one I am teaching where the activity can be completed in 30 minutes despite the allotted hour period. I learned from a teacher I work with, Griffon, that he added to the lesson in order to fill up more time. By adding to the lesson plan, the kids not only learn more, but also spend more time learning through working the activity instead of waiting around and playing for the last 20 minutes of the class period.

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