The aftermath

So it's the day after Metros Elementary night, where we had our second visit- this time to do our gardening activity. And there is a lot that I have to say about this whole activity and none of it is very good besides one thing. 

The students we got to work with were absolutely fantastic! I got a group of about 8 5th graders and they were the funniest yet the most curious students I have ever worked with on projects like this. I absolutely ADORED this age and I could definitely tell they still respected teachers but were starting to mature into their own minds and thoughts. They did my activity so well and definitely seemed to like working together to come up with new ideas for the second part of the activity.

Let me start from the beginning before I go into much detail. My partner texted me an hour before the event saying she could not go, due to her background check not being submitted properly and she found out minutes prior. So I went to the event alone; with No partner, and no read students since they either had class or had another event going on. I get there and set up for my assignment, with four laptops, and paper and pencils at the ready. my group gets set over to me and sits down, four in front of the laptop and four in front of a piece of paper, I introduce myself and we get started by listening to the AI story. I'm going to be honest, the story was pointless and did nothing for them, they were bored and got on their phones a couple of minutes in. The story did not connect to anything at all, so I cut it short and went straight to the point. Animals within a garden. 

So we talked for a little bit about different animals that are in a garden and once we got a handful of those listed we talked about what made those critters special- aka their attributes. we talked about butterflies and their wings, owls and their feathers, worms with their segments; all kinds of bugs and critters. what I had the students do was draw an animal they saw in the garden- it could be one that we talked about or another one they could think of. while they were drawing I asked, what made that critter special and they gave a verbal response. once that round was done, I had them switch devices so if they had a paper first they now had a laptop.

what they had to do next was draw their own made-up critter! they had to draw it with its own special attribute and tell me what made it special. every single child had so much fun drawing their own animal and they even got to name it. they had an absolute blast working together to figure out what would make that critter special within a garden and what attribute helped that animal to survive. every student finished right before the bell went off and it was time to switch activities.

Overall, I think the activity itself went great but every single part of everything else was atrociously planned. not trying to be ugly but it's how I feel about this whole activity. I feel like this whole activity would have gone way better if the weeks and weeks of workload that was so overwhelming, weren't for just 30 minutes of work. communication should have been a lot better between the staff and the workload shouldn't have been so much in general. it could have been really simple but it was proven that a really easy activity can be turned into something that I never want to do.  I hate to say this but the planning aspect of this whole activity, weeks and weeks of unnecessary preparation of things that I didn't even use, really makes me want to run away from teaching, not embrace the new and modern world of technology. 

Here are some photo examples of what the children did.