Teaching a Science Lesson

For the past two Fridays, Austin has participated in teaching the science unit to Aidan's grade 3 French class.

Aidan's teacher has encourage Austin to use French in the classroom, and Austin is making a good effort to do that.

The grade 3's are studying the solar system. For Austin's first lesson, he stood at the front of the class after preparing some drawings of the planets and the sun. He also included the asteroid belt and Ceres and Eres (dwarf planets). He explained what he knows about each planet and then he shared some of our books on space and the solar system, with the class.

That weekend, Austin began creating a 3D solar system which was taking up much of the floor space in our basement suite. He's planning to take it to Aidan's classroom for sharing with the class. He flipped between the art of creating the solar system, and the iPod to consult Wikipedia to find out how many moons each planet has. In some cases, he opted to show only half of a planet's moons, because there were so many (Jupiter has 32 moons!).

The next week, Austin spent 2 1/2 hours the night before, preparing a treasure hunt for Aidan's class. He drew pictures of Earth, red giants, white dwarfs, black dwarfs, black holes, pulsars and quasars, among others. He spent quite a bit of time on Wikipedia again, finding out about pulsars and quasars.

It's nice to see him so engaged and enthusiastic. He asked me for a folder, collected his papers, protected a pastel drawing of a pulsar in a plastic sleeve, taped the sides of the folder closed, and stated his plans to ask Aidan's teacher for some extra time for the science lesson. He has a lecture planned, and was going to do a question and answer session after the treasure hunt.

He did speak with Aidan's teacher in the morning, and Aidan's teacher said they could go over it at lunchtime. I went to the school with Austin and he and the teacher discussed Austin's idea, in French. The teacher made some recommendations (ie. to hide the drawings outside instead of inside the classroom), and Austin agreed. Austin told me later that a student from another class had picked up one of the drawings and ripped it and scrunched it up, even though Austin had asked him to leave it alone (hidden). It seems that Austin took that in stride, and wasn't too offended. He's come a long way from how he would have reacted before. Something like that would have been very upsetting, and Austin may not have been able to continue with his planned presentation and "lecture."

Anyway, as it turned out, Austin said there wasn't time for his lecture, but a few students asked him to explain what they had found. The "prized" drawing was the one of Earth, with "LIFE" written in large, bold letters on the reverse.