Dear Parents,

I first wanted to start by expressing by gratitude at the opportunity to be able to work

with and learn from your children over this past semester. It has been a privilege getting to know
each of their individual personalities and I will definitely miss the Tuesday mornings spent in
Classroom I. That being said, I would love to be able to share with you some of the things that
my class partner, Mary Fahey, and I have been working on in the classroom with your children.
We decided to conduct a science-based unit that explored the concept of matter. Under
the umbrella of this concept, we mapped out the different topics within this concept that we
wanted to teach to the students, and came up with interactive, hands-on lesson plans that would
help solidify these concepts in students minds. The different topics that we examined within the
concept of matter included states of matter (such as solid and liquid) and the transformation of
matter from one state into another.
To open this unit, we began by reading an age-appropriate book to the students called
States of Matter, which explained how everything in the world around us is made up of matter,
and how this matter appears in different states, such as solids, liquids, and gases. Using this book
as an opening hook introduced the children to the concept and helped familiarize them with
certain terms and academic language that would appear in later lessons. Next, we conducted a
lesson in which the students were given flashcards of every day objects, such as a basketball, a
glass of lemonade, a cat, etc, and, with help from myself and Mary, were asked to appropriately
place them on a board with two columns labeled Solids and Liquids.
The next lesson in our unit that we conducted involved the students working with me to
pour water into ice cube trays and then placing them in the freezer. The students were very eager
and excited to have a hands-on task for this lesson that that could be a part of. We talked as a
group about what state the water was in to begin with and what state it would be in later, and
made predictions about what we thought would happen to the water in the freezer. Several of the
students remembered the terms solid and liquid from previous lessons as well as their
characteristics. For this unit, the children were assessed on their participation as well as their
ability to actively make predictions and observations during the group discussion.
For the next and final lesson of our unit, Mary led a lesson in which the group took the
ice cube tray from the freezer and made observations about what had happened to the water and
which state of matter it had become. Mary then asked the students to make predictions about

what they thought would happen to the ice if heat was added to it; to demonstrate this, the
students observed as Mary melted the ice with a blow dryer. The students were very active in this
discussion and excellently used their prior knowledge on the subject from previous lessons to
help them make predictions and observations during this activity.
Again, I wanted to thank you so much for allowing me to get to know your children. This
whole experience has been invaluable to my experience as a future educator and I have learned
so much in my time spent with this class.
Sincerely,
Katie OMera