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Hi everyone! My name is Destiny and I am a first year teacher. I will be teaching 5th grade. I have a question in regards to small groups in Science. In college it was stressed to us to do small groups in Math and Reading, but no one ever mentioned Science or Social Studies (the two subjects I am teaching). Have any of you carried small groups in your Science classroom and if so how did you go about organizing them? Thank you in advance for you help :)

When I taught fifth grade I arranged four desks together to make a square table. All of our experiments and activities were carried out in these groups. I always had all materials in a container on the desks when they came in so we were ready to go. I taught four classes a day doing this.

Hi there, I love using group projects and group experiments. The challenge I had as a first year teacher was how to grade these. How do you grade if one student is doing more work than others?? I normally have a "participation" grade which basically starts at 100%. I move around the room and see if everyone is engaged. If so, they keep their 100%, if they are distracting others or not contributing, I can take points off. Usually, they do most of the project or lab report as a group but a small part is individual to make sure they understand the material individually. For example, they would do all parts of the lab report together but write their own conclusion. Good luck!

Small groups for every subject! My 5th graders sit in table groups of 4 and I use small groups throughout the day in every subject. In science, we do investigations and inquiries in groups of 2 or 4 (depending on the activity). It works well and saves on the amount of supplies I need to gather!