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!