Abigail Grider

TA Elizabeth Beese
Case 3 Scenario: Tornadoes
10/19/15
The lesson given is for a 3rd grade class to learn about tornadoes and natural disasters.
The overview wants the students to know about natural disasters, storms, tornadoes, and tornado
alley by the end of the lesson. However, the lesson plan does not give substitute teachers enough
information to properly teach this lesson in a way that the students will know about the elements
in the overview. This makes it very difficult for the substitute, and they would have to fill in the
gaps as they see fit.
One of the first issues in the lesson plan is how the overview relates to the rest of the
lesson, as well as the fact that the overview and concept are the exact same thing. The overview
says that the students will learn about natural disasters, storms, and tornadoes, but the lesson only
covers information on tornadoes. This means that if the substitute follows the lesson plan, the
students will only know half of the objectives by the end of the lesson. To solve this issue, the
overview and concept should be merged into a single objectives section, and then the objectives
should be rewritten to follow the lesson plan better. I suggest having objectives only focusing on
tornadoes.
As we continue improving the lesson plan, another issue is the materials section. The
materials given are not enough to adequately teach the lesson. The students are only given
crayons and construction paper, and the teacher only has bottle tornadoes. Ignoring the fact that
the only instructions for these materials is to have the students do the art project, the students
do not have a way of keeping the information on tornadoes (such as taking notes, getting a link
to a website on tornadoes, or even getting a paper with the information) and can only memorize
the information as the teacher explains tornadoes. The teacher is also expected to automatically
know everything about tornadoes and does not have any supplementary materials (such as a
PowerPoint, website, etc.) To fix this issue, I suggest creating a PowerPoint and printing out the
slides in the form of a booklet. The students can read and keep the booklets, and the teacher can
use the PowerPoint as a visual while they explain tornadoes. To adapt this to substitutes, have
the PowerPoint on a classroom flash drive or on an online source (and include the link!) so that
the substitute can access the material.
Since we have improved the materials, the procedures have automatically changed.
Steps 1-3 can be kept to introduce the lesson. Steps 4-7 and 9-11 can be incorporated into the
PowerPoint and booklets. The only problem with the procedures is now to eliminate step 8
because we are eliminating everything about natural disasters and just focusing on tornadoes. I
also suggest incorporating the steps in the closure section into the procedure section.
The final issue now is the evaluation section of the lesson plan. These steps include
having students create an art project, and doing a teacher observation. This is not an evaluation!
These steps would fit better in the procedure section, however, I believe that they should be
removed altogether. The lesson would be more beneficial as just a lesson, and have the students
study and take a small quiz on the lesson. This quiz would be created by the teacher and would
be printed out and ready for the lesson. I suggest creating a small five question multiple choice
quiz.