Last weeks lesson was a great improvement from the edible soil lesson, I'm very relieved to say! It wasn't flawless, but definitely better.  One issue was that our lesson was a continuation of what their classroom teacher was supposed to do with them the previous Thursday.  I guess since they missed so much school, they hadn't gotten to it.  She was able to squeeze it in with them Monday before they went to lunch, so the materials we needed we at least prepared. But since they had JUST done it about an hour before we go there, the lesson definitely didn't have the same effect it was supposed to.  It was supposed to be on how soil particles settle after a few days, but we had to work with soil particles that had settled in one hour! we did our best, and adjusted as well as we could!

The focus skills for this lesson were content vocabulary from the soil unit, common misconceptions about soil, and  the flow of the class.  Each week we spend a lot of time planning how much time we figure each portion of the lesson will take, so the flow of the class hasn't been an issue at all for us.  As far as content vocabulary is concerned, we spent time going over vocabulary words from this lesson and we explained why it's so important to fully and deeply understand content vocab.  We asked them what settle means, when we say we are looking at how soil particles "settle in water".  We thought this word might be confusing as it has many definitions (according to thefreedictionary.com, 28 different definitions to be exact!).  We discussed science content vocab as well.  

For common misconceptions we gave students a worksheet with some soil related misconceptions such as "Is soil the same things as dirt?", "Soil is brown", "Is soil alive?", etc.  The students got most of them right, but we stumped them with a few! 

Overall we had a great 4th lesson!