Classroom Context
This lesson was taught at Expeditionary Learning Academy at Moylan School (ELAMS) in a self-contained fourth grade classroom of 22 students. Three students don’t speak English, and many of the students are not up to grade level with reading skills, which I discovered while I was teaching this workshop. Prior to my lesson, the students had not learned anything about the water cycle, and if they had learned about states of matter, it was not this academic year.
Student Learning Objectives
Students will examine the natural progression of water through the environment and explain how the sun’s energy aids in that progression (CT.4.2 B.12, as chosen by the classroom teacher).
Guiding Question
How does water travel through the Earth and its atmosphere?
Learning Activities
I began the lesson by wetting two paper towels and letting the students feel them so they knew how wet they were. I placed one paper towel under a heat lamp (125 watts) and left the other one to the side. I told the students that the lamp represented the sun, and I asked what type of energy the sun gave off. Once that had been established, I asked the class to make a hypothesis about what would happen to the paper towels by the end of class (how would they be different by then) and why they thought so.
Leaving the paper towels to sit, I had the students work with their tablemates to create a diagram on the handout. First, they drew the picture, and then they were prompted by the questions at the top of the sheet (Where does water start?, Where does it go?) to help them think about how water might move around the environment and draw arrows to show their thinking. I helped some students with figuring out the flow of the water by asking more guiding questions (what happens to the water after it’s here?). A lot of the students knew the answers from knowing how the world works, so there were a lot of Plato-esque teaching moments of helping students recall information they already knew just from a non-academic setting.
When they were finished with their diagrams, and after a few students presented their diagrams to the camera, they received materials for a water cycle bracelet activity (pipe cleaner, beads, and information card), in which they utilized their diagrams and the provided information cards to piece together the correct order for their bracelets. When they were done, some of the students explained their bracelets to the camera, showing how they represented the water cycle.
At the end of the class, a few students were able to feel the paper towels again, seeing that the one under the lamp was completely dry, while the other towel was still damp.
Challenging Inequity
The students have equal access to materials, and they are able to check in with the teacher during the activity if they are confused and need help. Having a physical representation of the water cycle in the bracelet also helps overcome the mental barrier some students might experience when trying to visualize the concept of the water cycle. Additionally, some of the info cards are in Spanish for students who don’t speak English or prefer to speak Spanish.
Assessment
Before Teaching
I planned to hear from the students after they completed their diagrams, which would’ve helped me see if they were understanding the way the water cycle moves, and the diagrams they created would’ve shown me if the students were able to put the cycle together based on that understanding. If a student finished the bracelet activity early, I planned to ask them to explain their bracelet to the camera, which would’ve given me an idea of whether or not students were grasping the concepts connected with the activity. If there wasn’t time for students to explain to the camera, I brought complete but incorrect bracelets and planned to ask students to tell me why they were wrong. At the end of the lesson, the paper towel experiment and how the students were able to explain it would’ve focused more specifically on the sun’s part in the water cycle and how well students had grasped that concept.
After Teaching
The only part of my assessment that went as planned was the camera explaining. Because of some disorganization within the groups, I was not able to have the kind of conversation with groups when they showed me their diagrams that I had imagined, which also meant that I didn’t have the chance to properly explain to the students the next activity. Since I’d anticipated being able to explain things, I didn’t put all of the directions on the information sheets, and many students were confused by the activity, which made it difficult to assess learning. Also, we ran out of time at the end for everyone to be able to focus back to the paper towels and see the final results. The few students who did make a point to come look at them and feel them noticed the difference between the paper towels, but I didn’t have time to ask them how it related to the water cycle as the students were rushed off to thei gym class.
Still, I was able to capture some photos of student work, and the camera explanations were helpful in allowing me to assess learning after the lesson was over.
This student explained how his diagram showed the parts of the water cycle and how the water moves. He was mostly understanding the way water went from one stage to the next in a progression, though he mixed up a bit at the end.
This was one of the students I helped out. He called me over to see his diagram very quickly, and I saw that he hadn’t included all the items listed on the worksheet. Here is a reconstructed dialogue of our interaction:
Student: “I made the sun and the clouds ’cause the water is in the clouds.”
Teacher: “Then what happens after the water is in the clouds?”
Student: “…then it rains!”
The student was able to apply his knowledge of how rain occurs to the topic at hand, and in his explanation, he ties the rain into his diagram and completes the cycle.
Above is the diagram of another student who asked for help. She wasn’t sure what water vapor was, so I explained to her that is was the gas form of water, like ice is the solid form. Once she had drawn all of the parts needed for her diagram, we began putting the flow of the water in place. She figured that the rain came from the clouds, went to the ground, and then into the ocean, but she wasn’t sure about how the vapor fit in. I brought up ice again, asking her how water turns into ice, and she said, “Coldness.” I asked her, “If cold makes ice, what might make water vapor?” She thought for a moment before realizing, “Heat!” so I continued, “And what gives of heat?” and she immediately knew, “The sun!”
She finished her diagram and I gave her materials for the next activity, so she got to work and brought me this bracelet:
Here’s a reconstructed dialogue of when I asked her to explain her thought process to me:
Student: “I put yellow first ’cause it was the sun, and that’s what helps everything flow. Then I put clear ’cause the sun…”
Teacher: “Yeah, the sun creates the vapor.”
Student: “Yeah, and then I did gray ’cause that’s the rain that came down from the sky. Then I did blue ’cause that’s the ocean and the water. And then I did white because of the clouds.”
Teacher: “Okay…”
Student: “And then I did green for the grass when the water goes on it.”
Teacher: “Okay, so that’s really good, and I love especially when you have from the sun to the vapor and the precipitation to the water. I might put the clouds right here because the vapor forms the clouds and then it rains, right?”
Student: “Yeah.”
I then told her that if she didn’t want to redo her bracelet, she didn’t need to, as long as she understood where the mistake was. She said okay and went back to her desk, but near the end of class, she came back up to me and excitedly told me that she’d fixed it:
It still wasn’t completely correct, but I could see that she had switched around some things, making it clear that she at least understood the way the runoff (green) moved into the ocean (blue), from where the sun (yellow) heated it up into vapor (clear). The clouds (white) and precipitation (gray) were still mixed up, and she seemed stuck on wanting some sort of symmetry, but the layout of the bracelet matched her diagram more closely than the first time.
Above is the bracelet of a student who wanted to make a bracelet alongside me. I asked her to try on her own, but when when she insisted, I instead asked if I could explain how I was making mine to her, and she agreed. I told her that I would start with the clouds, so we put our white beads onto the pipe cleaner. Then I asked her where the water went after that. She said, “The blue?” (standing water), so I rephrased my question to ask what comes from clouds, and she said, “Rain.” We located the gray beads and added them on. Then I asked where water falls onto when it rains, and she figured out it was the ground, and we kept going back and forth until we’d finished the cycle. She had gotten stopped up when it came to how the sun heats up the standing water, but we happened to be working right next to the paper towels, so I reminded her that we had predicted the one under the lamp would be dry, and I asked her why, which prompted her put together that the sun affects the water.
This student wanted to present her bracelet to the camera, and she asked me for help reading. She presented only by matching the bead colors and reading the statements directly off of the information card. Part of the problem was that I did not give clear enough instructions–she assumed the information card contained the correct order of the colors, and I should’ve put a note on the card to clarify that the students were supposed to unscramble the order using their diagrams. However, this student also had difficulty reading, so I don’t know that clearer instructions would have helped anyway unless they were verbal.
It’s clear to me that this student has not learned because instead of using her diagram and her prior knowledge of water and its flow in the environment, she simply copied the order of colors that was given to her. Since she copied the explanations of the stages in her presentation, I also know that she did not grasp the concepts, and it’s possible that she didn’t comprehend the words she was reading off of the page.
Reflection
The lesson started as planned, and I set up the paper towel experiment. I had wanted to include another experiment, since this one only covers evaporation (which does meet the state standard, but it doesn’t cover the whole cycle). Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the experiments to work; I tried covering a glass of water and putting it under the lamp, but the 30 minutes I set aside for letting the experiment rest wasn’t long enough for condensation to occur. I also tried getting two cups of water and putting ice in one, but the temperature wasn’t warm enough for condensation to appear from the ice, so I decided to just stick with the paper towels.
The experiment worked, but I didn’t have the time to ask the students about the results. When it was time to look at the results as a class, everyone was too focused on their activity and presenting to the camera, and nobody wanted to sit down, so we ran out of time and the class had to go to P.E. This took away a chunk of my assessment plan because I was going to ask the students why the experiment worked and see if any of them could make the connection to evaporation, a term they had discovered during the lesson. If they connected it, it might’ve shown me that they understood the process of evaporation instead of just knowing that the suns dries things up.
Moving onto the other activities, I could have done better with giving directions. I passed out the worksheets while I was talking, but I noticed that many students just started focusing on the paper as soon as they received it, causing them to miss the direction to come talk to me when their diagrams were finished. This direction was a crucial part of the lesson, and since I was not able to get it across to everyone, I missed a big part of my assessment opportunity. My plan was to have groups explain their diagrams to me as a formative assessment so I could see where they were at in their understanding of the water cycle, and then I would have a moment to explain the next activity to them. Since most groups never came up to me, I didn’t get to explain the next activity as thoroughly as I’d wanted to, which created a lot of confusion.
I noticed that multiple students grabbed the bracelet materials and assumed that the order of the colors on the information card was the order the beads were supposed to go in. I had wanted to explain to the groups when we talked that the way the activity worked was that they needed to figure out the correct order with the help of the card and their diagrams, but since I didn’t talk to the groups, this didn’t happen. I realized that I should have put those instructions on the information card to minimize confusion, especially since, even if I had talked to the groups, there was no guarantee that they would’ve remembered my instructions. Even so, I’m not sure if written instructions would’ve helped solve the problem either, since I found out that many of the students in this classroom are below grade level with their reading skills. I had assumed that fourth graders would know how to read, and I hadn’t gotten any word otherwise from the classroom teacher, so I didn’t think that written instructions would be a problem. They were, though, as most students didn’t understand them and, consequentially, didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing. This created an issue for both the diagram drawing and the bracelet activity.
Additionally, though I’d made Spanish materials, figuring that the Portuguese speakers would be able to use cognates to understand, that was a false assumption. The Spanish was not close enough, and the Portuguese speakers didn’t understand. I was able to communicate with one non-English speaker using very basic Spanish vocabulary, so I was able to get him what he needed to do the activity.
Now that I know some of the students struggle with reading, I will try to plan my next workshop around this and focus on visuals and auditory instructions. If there is need for written materials in my lesson, I will make English, Spanish, and Portuguese materials, and I will try to be available for students who have trouble reading to ask for verbal directions.
I was pleased by the students who were able to understand the directions for the activities, since they seemed to be grasping the concepts and understanding how the water flowed from step to step. These students also made sure to ask me for help when the were confused (if they didn’t understand a certain term, if they got stuck, and so forth). I think these students did meet the objective, or at least began to meet it, since they were able to explain in their own words how the water moved and why, but the majority of the class did not reach that understanding.
Overall, I was more prepared for the specific environment of this classroom than I was during my last lesson, which allowed me to better assess where students were struggling and how to help them. I had better management of the space, but because this lesson was structured differently from my last one, my execution could’ve used some work. In my final lesson, I am going to try to adjust my planning according to the outcomes of the first two lessons so that I will be able to effectively manage the classroom while also creating an environment that is conducive to learning through clear guiding activities.
Sources & Materials
‘Connecticut State Standards for Science: Grade 4’. Perma-Bound Books, https://www.perma-bound.com/state-standards.do?state=CT&subject=science&gradeLevel=4. Accessed 8 Apr. 2023.
Water Cycle – Water Bracelet Activity | Horsham Water and Sewer Authority. https://www.horshamwater-sewer.com/water-cycle-water-bracelet-activity. Accessed 8 Apr. 2023.