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.