The race

We divided into groups, went outside, and had a relay race which ended in putting together paper skeletons. The goal of our activity: to see how an activity may be included within a lesson plan teaching on the skeletal system. This came out of a lesson plan for fifth graders from The Great Body Shop curriculum. We observed that when the class travels to another location, such as going outside the building, it may give the students an energy boost, but it can also be time demanding. This made me wonder if this was an effective learning tool. It was fun, but did it teach?

I think if I had done this within a class, I would have spent some time teaching the class about the skeleton structure before the race, rather than wait until we were in a competitive race and have them learn by trial and error how the bones fit together. We learned that not only do lesson plans need clear learning objectives, but for every learning objective there should be assessment criteria describing how this should take place. Looking through the grade level expectations (GLEs), I saw that this would be applicable for GLEs 1.1.1, 1.2.2, 1.2.3 and 2.2.1. In other words, by participating in this, 5th graders would be engaging together and showing appropriate cooperation skills to complete the relay within the rules/parameters of the event.