Practicum - Sharing a Lesson

So this isn't from a practicum or even from one of my normal classrooms. For my first three years of teaching I did academic support and enrichment for the Mapleton L.E.A.F. (Learning Enrichment and Fun) after school program. Last spring, I was doing a unit on astronomy and I wanted to teach kids about why there was less or more daylight during different seasons.

Here's what I did...I took a 500W light bulb that I borrowed from maintenance and screwed it into my desk lamp (I took the shade off). Then I put that on a chair, on a desk in the middle of the room. Then I grabbed the stick that I had dutifully duct taped a globe to the end of, pulled the shades, turned out the overhead lights, turned on the desk lamp, and was off to the races.

I started by showing the group of children what the earth looked like during the summer in Oregon. (I only had seven kids, mostly 4th and 5th graders, that day.) I asked them to put a finger on where they lived in the world, I only had to correct two that thought we lived in France. Then I had them watch as I rotated the "earth" through a few days. I asked them if there was light on Oregon for "a lot" or "a little" of the day. Then I asked them when the days were longest, then I asked them what season our "classroom earth" was in at that particular moment. It was fun, I moved through the equinoxes and winter and showed them the same types of things, equal amounts of light and dark, more dark than light, etc...

Likely one of my favorite lessons of all time. What was great was that I was (I just used the word "was" three times) able to gauge understanding constantly by listening to the childrens' answers to my questions and seeing the "a ha" moments with others.

Were I to reteach the lesson, I'd likely do it as a "discovery activity." I'd give students styrofoam balls with sticks through to represent the axis and a worksheet.