The Interest Approach- AEE 412 Lab

This week's lab was actually one that I was excited to write a lesson plan for. After a little bit of a debate with myself, I decided to select a unit I will be teaching in the spring that I have a little bit of knowledge about, Sheep & Goats. Surely I could think of an idea to get students to engage about learning a few of the breeds of sheep.

I decided to create a kinesthetic game to try and keep students engaged throughout the entirety of the interest approach. So I made a game. Not just any game though. I made a flyswatter game. This game I decided to add a little bit of a suspense to add a level of competition. On the whiteboard, I created a PowerPoint. On each slide, I had four pictures of different breeds of sheep. I would then list off either the breed name or a characteristic of a breed that appeared on that particular slide. The student were then able to "swat" the picture in which they believed was the correct answer. This took a few minutes, and I ended with having the students go back to their seats to move on to our Sheep Breeds PowerPoint in which they were given a chart to fill out for that lesson.

Although I felt that this interest approach was successful, there were a few things that I could have done to make it better.

1. Background music... I had a song uploaded and ready to go to add a bit more of a competitive suspense, but I forgot to hit the 'play' button. I feel that the flyswatter game would have been a bit more engaging with the theme song to The Amazing Race playing in the background.

2. Clarity in instruction. I did this in my previous lab, and I did it in this lab. I got lost in my words. I slurred a few words, mixed up some words, and even messed up the order of my directions in explaining the game. I asked if anyone had any questions, and I needed to repeat ALL of my instructions. Turns out that half of the students were lost as to what to do.

3. Don't rely on safety nets. Ok, I like to have something in my hand when I teach. It turns out that I didn't even realise that I was holding my lesson plan in my hand the ENTIRE TIME waving it around all over the place. I only looked at it twice, and even then I did not need my lesson plan glued to the palm of my hand the entire time. I had distracted students because of the waving paper in my hand.

Although I had a few little quirks during this lab, I feel that this was pretty successful. I had the students wanting to swat that sheep on the screen, and we were ready to move on to our lesson for the day. My goals for future labs include: leave the lesson plan out of area of distraction and focus on my own wording. Better luck next week.