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.