Learning About Habitats Through A Reading of, "The Salamander Room." By Anne Mazer: IST668 Lesson 1

 This week in my IST668 we had to start formulating ideas for library lessons.  I'm in a unique situation in that I can develop lessons and implement a few.  This week the 2nd graders at our school have began researching animal habitats.  I decided that I would create a lesson for their research and link it up to language arts.  I've pulled a bunch of habitat books for the students to look at, but I wanted to tie in an Easy Fiction book to introduce the topic of habitats and get them engaged and excited about habitats.  I found the book, "The Salamander Room," by Anne Mazer.  Our library does not own it, so I looked at other libraries on Oahu.  The only library that had it was in Kapolei, but it was not available.  Luckily, I was able to find it on YouTube.  Thank goodness for technology!

Photo courtesy of Amazon.com

The lesson took place in Ms. Soares' 2nd grade class at Daniel K. Inouye E.S.  I started the lesson by asking students what a habitat was to activate their background knowledge.  Many students stated that a habitat was a animal's home and I was happy to hear that some knew what a habitat entailed; climate, plants, animals, etc.  I then further engaged students by asking them if they had ever tried to catch a gecko (these lizards are plentiful here on Oahu).  I connected with the students by telling them about my daughters' experience's catching gecko's and trying to keep them as pets.

Once I felt good about where the students were at, I started the YouTube video of the book.  The classroom teacher helped me by casting the video via chromecast onto the class's TV.  I asked her to pause during certain times so I could ask student's questions about the reading.  The student's enjoyed this activity and this got them ready for the second part of the lesson.

After the reading I asked students to pick a wild animal they would want as their pet.  I asked a few students what their animal would be.  I got such responses as cheetah, grizzly bear, wolf, and shark.  Once students had the animal in their head, I had them think about what habitat their animal might live in.  From there I instructed students to grab their computers, log on, access our library's online database Pebble Go, and go to the animal habitats page.

 I then instructed students to take short notes of the descriptions of their animal's habitat, because they were going to have to draw a picture and write some sentences describing their animal's habitat.  I instructed the students to not write down the whole sentence, but just the descriptive words or "keywords."  I gave them an example of this my note taking strategy, and at first some students were more concentrated on describing their animals than the habitat.  However, once Ms. Soares and I circulated around to see their work, we were able to steer them more towards describing the habitat the animal lived in rather than the animal itself.   To keep students on track, I reminded them that they were making a room for their animal and it would need to look like their home in the wild as close as possible.  So, we needed to research where they lived in order to make their room as real.  This activity took place for about 20 minutes.

After note taking was done and computers were put away, I handed out drawing and writing template paper that the teacher provided.  From there I explained to students that they needed to look at their notes and based on what they wrote draw me a picture of their animal in it's "home" or habitat. Students were also instructed to write a brief introduction of the animal they chose and then describe to me in writing its habitat.  The lesson went off without a hitch and the students were completely immersed and engaged in the activity.  

Sample of my lesson with my daughter Kaydence.

At the end of the day I went back to talk to the teacher about the lesson and she stated that the students loved it!  In addition, because of the lesson they wanted to learn more about the different types of habitats.  She also stated that by providing this type of research students who normally do not participate were not only participating, but fully engaged and creating.  I felt fulfilled after the lesson and honestly felt as though I had found my place.  Now to work on my second lesson.  A post of that lesson will definitely be up in a few days!

Rome loved this activity and knew exactly what he wanted to write about.