Book groups were chaotic again today, but I should have expected this. They were practicing their theatrical presentations of the stories they have read all week. This got out of control with noise... I tried to pull it back together and let them know what my expectations were for noise, but they just got loud again. I understand that there are times for it to be loud, like when they are practicing a play, but I literally could not hear myself think. It was driving me crazy! And I'm just not quite sure how to make it quieter for activities like that, or how to make myself get over my problem with lots of noise. I realized that I got so fed up with the noise that I wasn't encouraging students when they were doing well. Even though they were noisy, they were doing really good things like working together to figure out different parts, making creative props and summarizing their stories. I should have ended the lesson by encouraging them in these things. Luckily the teacher did this for me so all positive reinforcement was not completely lost. I need to work on positive reinforcement in a meaningful way. Mrs. Schmidt models this really well. She constantly is encouraging her students, having side conversations with them and acknowledging the great things they do. Also, in the beginning part of the lesson I did an impromptu class summary of the book we read. I had a good idea and I went with it, which I was really proud of myself for. It went ok, but I realized that it would have been better if I had each student say one word, rather than 3 words. It was just too confusing! But they still did a really good job with it. Tomorrow we will see their presentations and I think I will have one last looney tunes clip to reward them with since they really have done a great job this week.
During writing they presented their trickster tales. They had been so loud and excited I thought for sure that they would have dynamic and exciting presentations. Instead they got all shy and quiet! I asked Mrs. Schmidt about it afterward and she hinted that when they aren’t confident of what they need to do that they tend to get more shy. This makes sense. And made me feel horrible. But it is right and a good lesson to have learned. I gave them a lot of structure when creating a trickster tale, but barely any structure about how to present it. I didn’t even think of telling them that! Silly things that seem so natural to us... but are really quite complicated to a 3rd grader. So tomorrow we present our book group stories so I will make sure to give them LOTS of guidelines for that.
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