Week 11 - Day 53

today was the introduction of kingdom protista. mrs. s stated that one of the nice things of having a student teacher in the classroom was that i bring in different ideas and spins on things. she always had trouble with kingdom protista due to lack of information/ideas for labs. i had a short video on protists that i found on discovery streaming and then had the students work out of their textbooks. the students needed to find an animal-like protist, a plant-like protist, and a fungus-like protist. they then had to draw and label their own models. the last part of the assignment was that they had to list five interesting facts on each one. i would have preferred to do a lesson i did with 7^th graders before and that was to find the speed of a protist. the science room had microscopes...but no slides. i contacted a teacher at the high school and he was willing to let me borrow slides, but after talking to the 7^th grade math teacher...he told me that the students wouldn’t understand how to do speed formulas. the students are farther behind in math than the year prior and he’s just starting word problems involving speed and distance. so, i decided to scrap the lesson and do the one with the models and facts. it went well, but i would’ve preferred to use the microscopes.