Engineering Lesson

Tuesday was our last day working with the students at Brigham Elementary, which was rather bitter sweet because I have grown to truly enjoy interacting with them and learning so much from these students! Our engineering lesson focused in on the building of towers and problem solving how to create a tower that was as tall as possible but did not fall down.

Gaining more experience with the English language learning students proved to have its learning moments for us, as well as, showed me where I had grown since entering the clinical site however many weeks ago.  One accommodation we were able to make for the students was to present them with multiple images of towers so that there was a clear understanding of what a tower was and what we were trying to recreate. In reflection, I believe there are some other things we could have done to better scaffold the learning of these young English language learning students. They had never had experience in building towers with pipe cleaners like we had simply assumed, having had these experiences ourselves. Some of them wanted to lay it on the ground and not create a tower that went vertically instead of horizontally. Because of this, I believe a model tower would be most beneficial for the students. We also did not take into account the fine motor skills of our kindergarten students. To create these pipe cleaner towers, we had it set up in a way that required the students to twist the pipe cleaners together in order to construct their building. This proved to be very difficult for some of the students which only required the teachers to help them more than should have been necessary for a problem solving activity such as this. It is possible to have used different materials that would allow the students to not have to twist the materials together, instead stick them together with materials such as marshmallows and dry pasta. This would make it easier for these students to work with. We also should have more explicitly stated that their goal was to create a tower that could stand on its own. They were all competitive and wanted to build the absolute tallest tower, however, the students did not take into account that adding pipe cleaner after pipe cleaner would be unable to stand on its own, which they did not care about in the slightest. Their only goal was to make their tall, which pretty much missed the whole point of the lesson. By more clearly stating this goal and posing the problem in a way they could more clearly understand, I believe we would have witnessed a higher success rate and the students would have been able to work on problem solving toward creating a tower with these goals in mind.

            Overall, I found this clinical experience to be helpful in allowing me to reach my goals of gaining more experiences working with students who are English language learners. Seeing them interact with their peers and other teachers allowed me to reflect greatly upon their specific needs that may differ from a general education student when out in the field. I found their excitement to be just as encouraging as any other young mind I have come into contact with and I appreciated getting to work with them on a biweekly basis!

Exceeds: Over the 500 word count! :)