Asteroids!

Once again, I should've written earlier, but oh well. 

I am finishing up my full-time teaching this week and I should be completely done with my last group on Thursday. I was supposed to plan for 10-day units, but because I see some groups more often than others, the groups I only see a few days a week are clearly much farther behind.

With my 4th and 5th grade groups we have been working on a Solar System unit. In the Sioux City district for science in the elementary schools, the use FOSSkits. These kits are supposed to be very hands-on, but they do not talk about the Solar System at all. However, this is a topic on the Iowa Assessment. So I decided with the help of my cooperating teacher to do a unit on this. 

Anyway, for the first 6 days of the unit we read short chapters and answered questions. The next day we did a relative size and distance lesson, which the students really enjoyed. After that we did a "scavenger hunt" research project on the planets, which the chapters we read didn't really go into great detail. Last Monday though I watched the news in the morning and saw something else about an asteroid coming very close to Earth and I thought it would be a great thing to show my students. I showed this video from CBS news and we discussed what we saw for the rest of class. The kids loved talking about it and really seemed very interested in their questions about what we watched. So while I was set back again on the unit plan, I thought this was a pretty important thing to show my students. I think I learned from this how important it is to be flexible in my teaching and planning.