Weekly reflection

When I was planning my lesson I didn’t feel nervous at all I knew what I wanted to do and what I would say to my student. As I watched my mentor finish the final story in the Basal Reader (a couple days before I started teaching) that when I started to worry. The students were really struggling with these stories. The stories in these books are far too complicated for our third graders. Many of them are at a first grade reading level and trying to read something that is far above their reading level is frustrating them. So before started to teach my lessons I had to change them up a bit so my students would have an easier time comprehending them. I would have to scaffold their learning more than I had intended.

                I started my first lesson on October 28th. It started off on a bad note and continued to go downhill from there. The students were not able to go to special that day because the music teacher was out. This made the students irritable; they had been in the classroom all morning and were very antsy about it. So when I sat them down to do a literacy lesson they wanted nothing to do with it. It took me ten minutes just to settle them down. After I finished reading the first page I asked my student what had happened so far and not one hand when up. From there on out I had to scaffold their learning by stopping every so often and explain what was going on. After we finished the first section we worked on a few of the vocabulary words that were used in the book and that really seemed to help them. I could tell they felt a little more confident.

The next day the kids were timid to read it and I even got a few moans and groans. Again they struggled through the reading although this time when I stopped to see if they were comprehending what was going on they seemed to be catching on. They could see some of the patterns that were occurring. When we completed the character chart the students really succeeded with this.  Many of them knew where to find the right answer and could prove it to me by reading a sentence. I was planning on doing the comprehension questions on this day as well but I could see that my student could take much more and I did not want to over load them so I decided to leave the questions until the next day.

Wednesday went much better. I decided to play the CD version of the book and the kids loved it. They were really into it and I had all of their attention instantly. After it was finished I passed out the worksheet and walked through the comprehension questions with them. My higher level readers caught on and were able to answer these questions easily. As for my lower level readers I had to walk around and re-explain what the question was asking. I worded it in a way as to scaffold their learning and lead them to the correct answer.

I did not get to teach my lesson today because of all the Halloween festivities. 

Week 1 Reflection

This week I began to teach my lesson on writing.  We started with a reminder of how to write, using capitalization, punctuation and spacing between words.  The students know all of these rules, but only think about them when prompted and questioned.  Day one was supposed to be an easy review for my class, but since I thought my students knew what to do I did not give as much explanation as I could and should have.  This was a learning experience for me to gain experience noticing when students need more help or when they are ready to be on their own.  My mentor teacher mentioned that I had a great lesson plan, but the key to a successful lesson is the classroom management and presentation.  I am hoping that throughout this unit plan I will be more comfortable making these types of judgement calls.

Since day one my students have been working on a writing prompt, “A Time I Was Scared.”  These “scared” stories are the first prompted writing my students have written. These stories have proven to be a bit challenging for a couple of reasons.  The first challenge has been the limitations of a prompt that my students are not used to.  Secondly, they have never revisited a piece of writing before, let alone revisiting it for editing, conferencing and creating a final draft.  Additionally, this lesson and writing lessons in general have proven to be difficult as a teacher to reach all of students in order to read, discuss and conference with them.  Since I have a wide variety of abilities in my classroom, all of my students have been at different stages in their writing since day two of my lesson.  Some students are still brainstorming while others are preparing to write their final copy.  Since students are on different levels, I thought it would be easier to conference if others were not there yet, but those that are behind tend to be the students that need more help and one on one attention.  I am very thankful to have a mentor teacher in the classroom as another person to help talk with the students.  She is not teaching the lesson, but during “work time” we both monitor and conference with students.  My goal is to be able to maintain a working classroom while editing and conferencing with only myself.  As of right now I think it is fine and I appreciate my MT for being in the classroom and supporting my lesson, but eventually I need to be able to do it without the training wheels.

Additionally, my mentor teacher has given me the suggestion to type the rough draft of each student, print it off and give it to them to edit.  This provides students with print, other than their handwriting to read and correct using the editing tools from day one.  This allows students the opportunity to reread their work individually before reading it to the teacher as well as practicing a necessary writing skill, editing.  This system has been working fairly well, and I am now excited to see the final products within the next few days!

Unit Plan Week 1 Reflection

I started teaching my unit on Monday. I was nervous because our unit changed somewhat late, and instead of reading comprehension I am doing writing. I was most nervous about the time frame I had to work with. Typically my students, while they write every day, only write for 20 minutes. I am worried about fitting my lessons into that time while still giving my students time to write.  On Monday, I discussed with my teacher and we agreed that centers were given a bit too much time so we extended writing by 5 minutes which helps some. 

My students are working to improve their foundational skills, work on editing their own writing, and conferencing with teachers to improve their writing. I was surprising pleased with the work my students were able to accomplish this week. They were excited about their skill books that we worked in on Monday (practicing both editing an incorrect sentence and also practicing capitalization, punctuation, and finger spacing) and asked to work on them more throughout the week. I was happy to see them interested and excited about writing. I hadn’t planned to use those books throughout my entire unit, but I may change that.

My students are working on one piece of writing throughout the week. We will prewrite using a story web, write a rough draft in the journals, conference with a teacher and edit what is in the journals, and then finalize on “spooky” paper for our scary Halloween stories. The students were excited about writing a spooky story, and they really liked the paper I had for them to write their final drafts on. In the beginning stages, I did have some students want to write the same story that I had modeled for them (I had a LOT of students suddenly afraid of heights) so it took some time to find a story/thing that was scary for THEM.

Overall, I think something I am the most concerned with, or worried about, is how to effectively reach all of my students. After the first day of writing, my students progressed at different rates and are currently all in different stages in their writing. I have some ready to finalize while I still have some working on prewriting and the rest everhwehere in between. I’m worried I won’t be able to get to conference with all of them, or that some will finish “too” early, or that I may have to pull kids from centers, recess, or special to finish theirs before Halloween and Parent Teacher Conferences.  Some things I’m going to work on next week is figuring out a way to effectively conference with my students, give them strategies to find other resources (MT, peers, journals, classroom resources, etc.) to help them BEFORE they come to me so they don’t feel stuck when I’m working with another student and cannot help them immediately.

Lauren Ghelfi- Lesson 1 Reflection

 I was extremely nervous going into the lesson today, because I not only taught writer's workshop, but I also stepped in to teach everything due to the fact that we had a substitute. Overall, I feel that the majority of my students understood the purpose of this lesson. Not only was I trying to get students to understand what the Good Qualities of a Small Moment story are, but I was trying to focus on my core practice which was shared writing. Today's lesson was all about sharing your writing with your partner and celebrating what you did well. When I first dismissed the students they seemed confused on what I was asking them. Many of them thought they were going to be writing today, and I should have been more specific that we were just reading our writing today. 

As I walked around in groups I noticed that many students needed to be directed in following the steps of the partnership procedure. Many of them did not understand that first they were either listening or sharing, and then they switched roles. This is something I could have done differently by asking a student to state what I said in their own words. Making sure they knew exactly what they were doing before we broke off into partner groups. 

One of the things that I feel hindered the partnerships today was the lack of completed small moment stories by the students. Students who have not completed small moment stories could not really share a completed piece. Their partner then seemed unsure of what to compliment on. I should have been more clear on complimenting on what they have completed, not just IF something was completed. 

I learned that a the ones who did have completed stories had multiple completed stories. I was actually very excited to see that partners were able to share multiple stories and give compliments on more than one. They were also able to compare the stories and say what they liked that someone may have done in both stories. One thing that I thought was especially great that extended beyond my objectives was one of the students complimented his partner on her use of thought bubbles in pictures. We actually have not gone over thought bubbles only speech bubbles. I thought it was interesting to see that this student had picked up on these from another story and included them in her own story to create a good small moment story. 

One thing that I will continue to work on is explaining the steps to partnerships. A few groups were not taking turns and were not paying close enough attention to their partners stories. So when it came time to compliment their partner, they forgot what the story was about completely. For the few students that this happened to, unfortunately I was not surprised. They tend to need more guidance than others when it comes to stretching their thinking further. 

If I were to re-teach this lesson again, I would ask my MT, or in this case the substitute to pretend to be my partner when modeling the activity. I felt that students were distracted by the Moose puppet. Although I thought it would be fun for the kids, it was too distracting for them and I do not think I was able to implement the partnership procedures as well as I would have liked. 

Alyssa Rubrich Initial Blog post #4

About a week ago I decided that I would teach visualization for my unit plan. I have been trying to think of different lessons that I could do to have the kids work on visualization. I came up with a few ideas but I didn't have enough to supply two weeks worth of lessons. After reading chapter nine it gave me some insight of what I should include in my lessons.
My questions to my group members are.... Have you taught visualization to your students? If so, what did you do? What makes you think it worked well/ did not work well? Were there any reading strategies/ sample units in chapter 9 that you would like to incorporate into your literacy lesson? Explain why you think they are worthy of being in your lesson.

I really enjoyed reading the section about, "Creating Mental Images That Go Beyond Visualizing." I love the idea of not only getting the students to see what they are reading but to imagine the sound, taste, touch, and smell too. I think it is great to get them to really imagine these details. Being able to imagine all of these things will truly allow the reader to reflect on what they read and remember it. They will have created a distinguished mental image and feeling that will be hard to forget. I also love how you can incorporate descriptive writing into this lesson. You could split the class into small groups and have each group get a different picture.  Have the students individually write a paragraph about what they would see, hear, smell, taste, and feel if they were in that picture. After they are finished they could talk within their group about the details they included. Eventually they could share their paragraph with the whole class and they could compare what they wrote to the original picture.