Literacy Lesson Post-Reflection

After my literacy lesson I found that I had a lot to reflect on. This is because my lesson did not go as I had planned. While I found this upsetting at first, now I can see how much I can learn from this experience. Since my lesson was during literacy centers it lasted twenty minutes and I gave it twice in a row. The first group of students that I taught was a group of five ‘middle level’ readers. The lesson went smoothly and the students seemed to really enjoy the activity. After this first lesson, I taught to a group of six ‘high level’ readers. Also, three of the students in this group were from the next-door classroom. The lesson started off shaky because I had a hard time gaining the attention of the students. They were definitely distracted by the items that I had in front of me and by each other. However, once I started the lesson, I found that they also enjoyed the lesson. I could tell that the students were putting effort into reading with appropriate expression and tempo. The student especially seemed to grasp the concept of the lesson when I modeled reading without, and then with, appropriate expression and tempo.

One strength of my lesson was that I was prepared for differentiation for groups. I wrote three different versions of the script and my cooperating teacher and I agreed that this differentiation helped to make the learning objectives possible for students of all skill levels. Another strength of my lesson, as I mentioned above, was my modeling. I think that this really connected to the students because it was very obvious that, initially, I was not reading the ‘right way’ to them. I also thought that a strength of my lesson was using the small white board to go over how to read with expression based on different punctuation marks. I was able to help students with their thinking at this point and have them practice the appropriate expression as a group. Lastly, I thought I did a good job at guiding all of the students during the lesson. I bounced from group to group in order to get an idea of how they were doing and to provide support when needed.

While I felt the components of my lesson went well, there were certainly challenges to my lesson. I initially struggled with gaining the attention of the students. Some of the students had never met me before and I wonder if this contributed to some defiance as well. I also noticed that the two students in particular were very distracted by the materials that I had out on the desk. If I were to give this lesson again, the first change I would make is to have these materials hidden at the beginning of the lesson. I think that this could have helped with the behavior of the students. Another change I would make to help with behavior management is that I would switch up some of the pairings within the group. Now that I know the students from the other classroom a little better I would choose to pair students together in ways that I feel would support learning. I also noticed that one student in particular from my class had a hard time focusing. This is a behavior that I have seen often from him throughout my time in this classroom. I think that a simple accommodation for him could have been to provide him with a fidget to hold during the lesson.

If I gave this lesson in a class of mine in the future I would also make sure to monitor the noise level in the room. It was getting very loud during my lesson and this noise definitely contributed to the energy and distraction within my group. In my future classroom I would have the whole class freeze and remind them that we need to talk in a whisper voice when we are in centers. Lastly, I think that I would add in having an anchor chart in my lesson for the students. This could have helped them to remember what we were learning instead of me just expecting them to remember from their heads.

Overall, this lesson taught me so much because it did not go perfectly. It reminded me that I need to be intentionally about every aspect of a lesson while I plan it. This lesson also showed me how important it is for me to know my students and to plan accommodations for them when necessary.

End of the Semester...

When I look back at my initial blog this semester is it exciting to see how much I have grown. I honestly feel like I have improved as a teacher more this this semester than in any previous semester. The first goal that I made at the beginning of the semester was to “improve on building professional relationships in my clinical setting”. I certainly feel like I have gotten better at this. Something that I made sure to do this semester was be more conversational and open with my cooperating teacher and other faculty in the school. Another goal I made was to become more comfortable with teaching science and social studies. After teaching my social studies and science lessons I feel more knowledgeable in these areas. I know I need a lot more practice with teaching but my lessons went well and I feel like I learned a lot about how to give lessons in these subjects.

I also wanted to work on integrating technology into my lessons. This is something that I have done a little this semester but I would consider it an on-going goal. I have used the Smart Board in my classroom but I want to continue to broaden my horizons to other types of technology (ie. iPads, interactive games, websites, virtual field trips, etc.). My last goal was that I wanted to work on my classroom management skills. This is something that I have made a very conscious effort to do. I feel like I have learned a lot this semester through both my classes and my clinical teacher about how to work on classroom management. I know that this goal will be one that I will keep working on every year when I am a teacher. Developing effective classroom management takes a lot of careful consideration and experimentation.

Next semester in student teaching I know I will continue to work on these goals and add more. One of the main goals that I really want to pay attention to during student teaching is to learn as much as I possibly can from the teachers I get to work with. I know that I have so much to learn from professionals that have been in this field and have years of experience. Another goal I want to work on when I am in student teaching is developing connections with the students. This is something that I found a little tricky in our clinical settings because we only get to see the kids once a week. However, I know from my experience working at a Montessori school during the summer that forming these relationships with individuals can be one of the most rewarding parts of being a teacher. My ultimate goal is to one day be a teacher that students feel comfortable and connected with. Lastly, I want to work on being enthusiastic and energetic when I am in at school. I know that the mood of a teacher completely shapes the tone of the classroom. I know I will have work to do myself with getting on a better sleeping schedule so that I can be rested and ready to teach everyday.

When I look back at my clinical experience this semester I realize I have learned a lot. I was lucky enough to have a clinical teacher who was very open and took every opportunity to teach me more about being a teacher. She was full of advice and she has taught me about working with students, groups, and coworkers. Now that I look back at my goals I can see how much I have learned. This personal growth makes me excited for how much I am going to learn in student teaching! I am looking forward to being in one classroom everyday of the week for an extended amount of time.

https://k12teacherstaffdevelopment.com/tlb/can-the-teachers-mood-impact-student-performance/

Here is a link to an article I read about how the mood of the teacher can impact students. This is one of my goals that I want to make sure to always be contentious of. 

Literacy Lesson Pre-Reflection

In order to make decisions regarding my clinical literacy lesson I referred back to the assessments I administered on a select few students in my class. I chose three students to test on the areas of alphabet knowledge, sight words, and fluency. Of these three areas, the students had the most difficulty with fluency. The test that I administered to test fluency was a fluency rubric that tested the areas of expression and volume, phrasing, smoothness, and pace. One at a time, I pulled each student aside and had him or her select a book that was at their reading level to read to me. Then, I had them read the book aloud to me as I scored them using the fluency rubric. The rubric had a possible sixteen points and at the bottom of the sheet it said, “scores below 10 indicate that the student needs additional instruction”. The three students that I tested all fell between the scores of six and eight, which told me that they all needed extra supports in the area of fluency. The strengths of these students in regards to the areas of fluency was phrasing so I decided not to focus on this area for the lesson. The categories of fluency that they all struggled the most with were expression/volume and pace. While I know that some of this is a result of these students still being in the beginning stages of reading, I feel like there are definitely ways to help them develop these skills.

When I shared the results of my assessments with my teacher, she agreed that doing a lesson on fluency would be most beneficial for the students. She also said that this is aspect of literacy that she feels all of the students in her class could improve in. I have noticed that even the students in the strongest reading groups do not read with expression and appropriate pace. These are skills that need to be explicitly taught in order for students to understand their importance. Therefore, I decided to make my literacy lesson a small group activity that teaches students about using appropriate expression and pace while reading. My teacher asked me to do my lesson during the literacy centers. Centers last for twenty minutes total and are divided into two, twenty-minute rotations every day. The centers contain five to six students each. This information also shaped the idea for my lesson because I knew it had to be completed in twenty minutes, have a quick clean up time, and not be too loud/distracting for the rest of the class.

Based on all of this information, I decided to do a “Reader’s Theatre” style lesson. I wanted to make sure to both explicitly teach the students and give them the opportunity to practice what they learn. I plan on modeling reading a passage of a book in a very monotone way and with a quick pace in order to get students thinking about how I could improve my reading. They will help me come up with ways that I can read in a more fluent way. After I explicitly teach them about expression and pace, students will have the opportunity to read a story in “Reader’s Theatre” style with a partner. If there are an odd number of students I will be a partner with a student. In order to make sure this lesson is developmentally appropriate, I will first have students practice reading the lines without worrying about expression or pace. Then, they will add in these elements. I have also made sure to differentiate for the different levels of the reading groups by writing stories that vary in difficulty.

The content presented in this lesson is important for kindergarten-aged students to learn because reading with expression and pace are crucial skills to obtain in order to become a fluent reader. These are skills that may seem obvious to adults but need to be taught explicitly to children. My literacy lesson will involve students in thinking critically about ways to be a good reader and have them practice using these skills. I also know that these students have learned about how different types of punctuation can impact how a sentence is read (exclamation mark, period, and question mark). In my lesson I will review these different types of punctuation and have them practice reading the same sentence three times with a different punctuation mark ending it each time. This will help students to think about using these punctuation marks as clues about how they should be reading a sentence. Then, when they are reading together as partners, I will also remind them to pay attention to these punctuation marks.

I chose to write my own stories for the students to read because I knew that my teacher wanted the lesson to work on “short u” sounds. Therefore, I made sure to include these types of words in the stories. I also chose to write my own stories because I knew that I would need stories that varied in difficulty for the different levels of the reading groups. For my lesson, I also chose to use the materials of a small white board, character cards, and an expression die. The white board will allow me to write sentences and practice punctuation concepts with the students. The character cards are small pieces of paper that I will hand out to the students to help them remember which character they are for the reading. I know that this is something that the students may forget quickly so having the visual in front of them will help. Lastly, the expression die is a tool that students will use at the end of the lesson to randomly select a type of expression for them to read the story in. This is a fun way to get students thinking about expression and practicing applying it. Overall, all of these materials will help to support the students in reaching the objectives of the lesson.

I will know that students have met the objectives of this lesson based on my observations and a checklist that I will fill out during the activity. I will be looking to see if students demonstrate appropriate expression for punctuation marks, expression during the die activity, and if they read with appropriate pace. I will also be sure to add comments to my checklist so that I will be able to remember specific aspects of how each child was doing when I look back at it. Additionally, I will be listening to the partners while they read in order to scaffold them as I see fit.

Science In My Clinicals

In my clinical placement I have seen very little science instruction take place. The kindergarten teachers definitely do not see science as an area of importance for their students. As I have mentioned in previous posts, my teacher spends the majority of the school day teaching about literacy and math. Everyday, there are literacy and math centers and lots of time devoted to learning new skills in these subjects. It makes me sad that other subjects, such as social studies and science, are ignored.

When I brought up to my teacher earlier in the semester that I needed to give a science lesson to the class, she seemed enthusiastic about it. She mentioned that the kids do not get to do science very often so they would be excited to do anything hands-on. The topic that I was given was rocks, soil, and water. Even though this was not the most exciting topic the kids loved it! It was clear that they enjoyed thinking about how the world around them works. I know that when I was a child, science was one of my favorite subjects. This is because it teaches you about real life facts and provides answers to questions that you may wonder about on a day-to-day basis.  I was happy to see how engaged the students were in my lesson, but this also made me sad because they do not get to experience this excitement on a regular basis.

Other then my lesson, I have only seen science taught one other time this semester. My clinical teacher read a book to the students on planets and then had them do an activity together on the rug. She had a small yellow ball that she was pretending was the sun and the students were the Earth. The goal of the activity was to have students face the way the Earth would face at different times during the day. For example she held up the “sun” and said, “Which way would the Earth be facing if it was nighttime?” In this example all of the students turned to have their backs to the “sun”. Even this small activity seemed to be so interesting to the students. They all had tons of questions about the planets and they were visibly sad when the lesson was over.

What I have seen in my clinicals this semester differs greatly from what I have learned about effective teaching in my courses at ISU. Science is a topic that teaches important skills like critical thinking and problem solving and it should not be ignored. When I am a teacher I know I will make sure to include science in my classroom. I feel like by the end of this semester I will have learned a lot about how to come up with fun/hands-on science activities. I am also looking forward to this summer when I will be working again at the Montessori school near my home. Science is one of the topics that we focus on most with the children and I can’t wait to apply what I have learned this school year with my Montessori kids.



Here are some pictures of Montessori science activities that I have seen my summer students do. Montessori has a large focus exploration and hands-on materials. I am excited to get back to teaching science this summer!

Post- Lesson Reflection

After implementing my social studies lesson in my clinical classroom I have a lot of ideas about how it went and how it could have been improved. Overall, I felt like the lesson went well and the students were engaged. I was able to keep the students interested throughout the lesson by having frequent and varying checks for understanding. In the beginning of the lesson, I took the time to teach the students sign language for the words “want” and “need”. I feel like this ended up being a very successful part of my lesson. It provided me with another way to check for student understanding and it also allowed the students to express their knowledge through movement.
     
Another way I was able to keep the children engaged during my lesson was by having them recall on their previous life experiences regarding wants and needs. I could tell that allowing the children to talk about these experiences helped them to feel connected and interested to this topic. Also, when I had the students come up to the white board and match pictures under the category “want” or “need” I could see that the students were engaged and excited to participate. This enthusiasm carried through until the end of the lesson where the students drew/wrote about one thing they wanted and one thing they needed.
     
While students were participating in this last activity, I walked around with a checklist to assess student understanding. Since I was also supporting students and answering questions, I was not able to fill out the entire checklist during this time in the lesson. I did however finish the checklist after the lesson when I got all of the students’ worksheets back. I was very pleased to see that all but one student correctly identified a want and a need in their life. However, this one student did make me consider how I could have made sure to provide every student with support during this lesson. Looking back I should have made an extra effort to check on this particular student’s work. She is a child who is regularly pulled out of class for extra supports and often has difficulty grasping foreign concepts. In retrospect, I should have made sure to check in on students that I suspected would need more assistance early on in the activity in order to make sure they were on the right path.
     
My data from this assessment allowed me to know that my students understood what the difference between a want and a need is. They seemed to be confident in being able to identify wants and needs, and it was fun to see students come up with unique examples. If I were to give this lesson again, I would certainly stick with using a checklist but I would make sure to put a symbol, such as a star, next to the students that I would want to check in with first. Every week as I get to know these students better I find myself thinking of ways that this knowledge can help to shape my lessons and my assessments. I am learning which students typically need more assistance and which students catch on to new ideas more quickly.
     
Overall, looking back at my implementation of this lesson I am able to think of so many ways to improve my next lesson. First, I want to make sure to keep the aspects of this lesson that went well. For example, I felt like I was well prepared, had good checks for understanding, interacted well with the students, and was able to keep student attention. Now that I know what parts of my lesson were successful I will be sure to carry these ideas over into my next lesson.
       
I am also able to realize how I can improve my next lesson based off of this experience. The first change I am going to make is to think more carefully about timing. I found this to be a challenge and I plan on I wearing a watch for my next lesson to help me stick to my schedule. When the timing was thrown off in this lesson, I found that I did not have enough time to conclude the activity the way I had planned. I know how crucial the end of a lesson is and I plan on making sure to have time for this section in my next lesson.
     
I also am going to have a more carefully thought through plan for one particular student in my class. I had made some accommodations for him during this lesson, but for my next one I want to make sure that I have better options. I am going to make sure to have a clear plan for ways to support him during the next lesson and what I will do if I have behavioral issue with him during the lesson.
     
Lastly, I want to make sure to have more opportunities for student discussion and use of the academic language. While I did have the students discuss the topic of wants and needs, I did not have them practice explicitly using this language. For my next lesson I am going to make sure to have students use the academic language in a way that will support their learning of the overall content. I know that by making all of these changes I will be able to provide my students with a lesson that supports all leaners and teaches them as effectively as possible.

Social Studies in Clinicals

So far this semester I have not seen any social studies in my kindergarten clinical classroom. In fact, when I asked my clinical teacher about social studies she said, “we don’t really do social studies”. I think this is a sad thing to hear! Through my ISU class TCH 277 I have learned how much fun teaching social studies can be. I went into this class with a negative view on social studies because of my own experiences as a student. What I remember from social studies as a kid was that we would mostly read out of a textbook and watch videos. After learning about ways to make social studies fun this semester I feel like it could actually be one of the most fun subjects to teach.

Even though I have not seen social studies in my clinical setting this semester I have seen it in a past semester. Last semester, in my third grade classroom, I saw my teacher read books to the students about moments or people in history. Also the students when the students were learning about different environments (desert, rainforest, etc.) they learned about countries where these environments are found. Other than these two examples I have not seen social studies in my clinical experiences. These examples did not really go along with what I have learned about at ISU because the students were mostly being taught through direct instruction and not their own experiences. I think that it is unfortunate that social studies is so often pushed to the side for younger classrooms and not addressed until older grades. Social studies introduces important concepts that can and should be introduced to young children.

After seeing this lack of social studies instruction in my clinical settings I will be sure to include social studies in my future class. I feel like I already have so many ideas about ways I can incorporate social studies into the school day. First, I would make sure that my social studies lessons integrate other subjects as well. This often happens naturally, but I want to intentionally plan ways I can teach other subjects within social studies. For example, if I was teaching a unit on cultures of the world I could have students explore write, draw, create art, dance, make a video, or sing to show what they learned about another culture. This could cross into the subject areas of music, art, literacy, and technology.

Another thing I will make sure to do in my social studies lessons is provide opportunities for students to do activities that are hands-on and applicable to their lives. I think that physically doing something makes learning a concept not only easier but also more fun! I also feel like relating social studies lessons to students personally can make concepts more simple to grasp and more exciting.
After spending these last few weeks at my clinicals I find myself wondering what is happening on the days of the week that I am not at clinicals! This week, I went into clinicals on Monday and it was interesting to see how parts of the day were structured differently then they are on Wednesdays. I want to make sure to ask my teacher more about how the school week has been so far that week when I come into clinicals on Wednesdays. I find that having some background information on how much the kids are familiar with a topic can help to direct my instruction.

http://www.naeyc.org/files/yc/file/200509/SocialStudiesBooksBTJ905.pdf
Check out this awesome list of children's books to use as a part of social studies lessons for young students! I have noticed a lack of books that address issues covered in social studies in my clinical classroom this semester.

P.S. I highly suggest "Sky Dancers" by Connie Ann Kirk. I read this book with a third grade student last semester and it had cool information and beautiful pictures!

Workjobs!

For one of my classes this semester we are required to make something called "workjobs". A workjob is an activity that a child could do independently. Below are my four workjobs that I have created!

This is a Civics and Government workjob titled "When I am Upset...". This workjob is appropriate for kindergarten-aged students. Students must arrange the pictures either under the categories "good choices" or "bad choices". The pictures are of things that a student can do when they are feeling upset. Some of the options in the "good choices" category are things like going to the peace table or taking a butterfly breath. 

This is a Economics workjob I created titled "Money Matching". It is appropriate for 1st grade students. The students match the pictures and the values of money the name of the coin or bill. Afterwards students can check their answers on the back of the file-folder.

This is a geography workjob I made for second graders titled "Name Our Neighbors". I cut the states neighboring Illinois out of different colors of felt and then created labels for the states. Students are to place Illinois in the center of a large piece of white felt and then put the bordering states in the correct spots. To finish, students label the states. This workjob aligns with Illinois standard IL 17.A.1a 

This is a History workjob I created titled "Inventors and Inventions". This workjob is appropriate for third grade students. The students must match the name of the inventor with the inventions on the timeline. All of the materials are attached to the file-folder.