Inquiry Through Skype

Today my group and I taught our inquiry lesson. We were really excited because we knew it was going to be great but we were still very confused about what was going to happen. I was at school until 8 the previous night working on our powerpoint and written lesson with my group. We met in the morning to practice our slides. We didn’t know how the Skype was going to work or if the students were going to have questions so just in case we made a backup plan! When we walked into the class we began our lesson by reviewing the class rules and teaching the students what a mystery was. What the students had to do was ask yes or no questions to the other class to determine what biome they were from then they had to figure out the state. I explained to the students that not even we know where they are from, only Dr. Smirnova does. Dr. Smirnova then connected with her friend from a different state on Skype and the students began asking questions. The other class guessed our correct biome first, so our class had to continue asking questions. Eventually our class guessed their biome and not long after they narrowed it down to 2 states and one of them was actually correct! So our class then guessed if it was Kansas and they were correct! All the students were so proud that they guessed it first. So the other class continued to ask questions until they came up with New York. Both classes then continued to ask each other questions about what animals they have, the type of weather, if there are any wildfires, and even asked about pollution! Since the other class was in 6th grade they could only Skype for 30 minutes because thats how long their class periods were. The students really loved this Skype and were very enthusiastic when asking questions. I was so impressed by the questions they were asking!

After the Skype was over, we told the students we had a garden activity for them. We asked the students to create their own garden and they had to put in plants and animals that corresponded to their biome. We provided websites for them to get their birds and flower ideas from. They had fun with this too, so we were really happy about that! After the students finished their garden, we asked them to share 2 things that they put in their garden. The things they put in them were really amazing. Some of the birds I haven’t even heard of so I was really impressed!! For our independent practice we had the students write a tweet to the mystery Skype class about what they learned about Kansas. The students wrote very good tweets and were extremely quiet while doing this which was great. At the end we thanked the students for their hard work and critical thinking throughout both of our lessons. We gave them a prize again for winning the teacher vs class game so they were all really excited!
 Overall the experience I had teaching this semester was a lot better than last semester. Both lessons were engaging and the students seemed to really enjoy both of them. This time around it was easier to make the lessons because I had the background from social studies methods!

Everyone in my group was great to work with and I’m really glad we had such a great outcome. Now the next time I’ll be teaching a full class will be when I student teach next semester, so that’s really exciting but also scary!!!