Comstock Park — When fourth-grader Aricela Casares learned she would be the teacher, she knew immediately what her topic would be: how to draw a dog.
“I wanted to do this lesson because I am good at drawing and my favorite animal is a dog,” she said.
As the school year wound down in Comstock Park, all 20 students in Kayla Fricke’s class had the opportunity to “teach the teacher.”
“I wanted to do something at the end of the year that would tie into their interests and give them the opportunity to share something about themselves,” Fricke said.
Students were tasked to create a lesson plan on a topic of interest. The assignment required students to research their topic, create a lesson plan and prepare a presentation, Fricke said.
Presenters also included a question that classmates needed to answer to demonstrate they had learned something from the lesson.
Fricke said she was pleasantly surprised by the variety of topics students shared, including how to build an F1 LEGO model, identify types of flowers, bake cookies, draw, fish, grow plants, make a terrarium and play a math game.
“The lessons incorporated parts of our curriculum — including math and science concepts — such as how baking cookies involves chemistry,” she said.
Today’s Lesson
Belle Vanstee provided step-by-step instructions on making cookies, noting that the end result is ultimately a chemical reaction. Her classmates even got to taste the results, as Belle brought in cookies she had baked.
“My favorite cookies to make are peanut butter and chocolate chip cookies,” Belle said after presenting her lesson. “I enjoyed doing the lesson because I was able to be creative in decorating the slides the way I wanted and deciding how I wanted to put it all together.”
Ella Domin shared a portion of her Polish heritage by presenting a lesson on how to say a few words.
“So before we begin, this is not like the American alphabet,” Ella told her classmates. “‘W’ has the ‘voh’ sound.”
Then she pronounced the Polish word for water, woda, as “VOH-dah.” The students repeated it.
During Aricela’s lesson on how to draw a dog, she used a story to guide classmates through the process, first by drawing “a stick figure with no arms,” then the figure being attacked by bees represented as dots, and finally, with the figure falling into a lake represented by a circle.
Eventually, students found they had created a puppy with long, floppy ears, which they proudly showed to one another.
“It was fun,” Aricela said of being the teacher, adding that she learned the dog-drawing story from her aunt.
“I thought it was creative, and I was happy to do something about what I do in my free time.”
Read more from Comstock Park:
• Elementary school integrates therapy dog into lessons
• Students explore holiday traditions through research project
