Day 4

Today’s lesson did not go as planned. I do think it was still successful. The reason it didn’t go as planned was because the students took much more time to finish writing their drafts than I had expected. The students did not even know how to right justify their names or the date. They also needed help double spacing their writing. I did not anticipate that this much instruction would be necessary. Also, it seems as if they have had no keyboarding practice since most students were typing with two fingers. The teacher generally expects the students to turn in typed copies of their final drafts. Because of this, I changed around my lesson and made sure to make time for this. It ended up taking the entire 90min period. Some students finished early and read independently but I didn’t get to do a reading lesson at all today.

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I feel as though the day was sort of a lazy day on my end because I didn’t know where the computer lab was, the rules of the lab or the expectations that the classroom teacher had for printing final drafts. Because of this, he did a lot of the directions before we moved to the lab. I did model  the way the students should be formatting their papers and we both circulated the room throughout the lesson to help students make corrections and add details. Many students are very proud of their works. I can’t wait till they share them tomorrow in class. This day also gave me extra time to re-think my lesson for tomorrow and I am excited to teach using the new ideas that I have come up with.

Language Arts Day 4 was all on classroom management!

Everything went well today, but had a few challenges.  Today was the first day that I worked with the girl at Children’s Hospital so we skyped her into class.  It was also the same day for iPads in the classroom and I was observed by Dr. S.  management was a little difficult today because of all of these elements that I had to include, but the teacher said I handled it well for being thrown into all of it so that was encouraging.

The lesson today on personification went well.  I started off with a video clip of the giving tree which introduced the personification aspect.  That was good and then I went into examples which they could all pick out so that was great!  Then the iPad portion came and the students had to create a pic collage of the personification in the poem I gave to them.  This is where the management was difficult.  I had students working on them which was great but then when they were presenting they were still playing with them and I announced many times to turn them off and close the case.  After they presented they had to show the girl on skype so there was a lot of things going on at once.  In the future it would be nice to know when I was skyping with my student so I could prepare better.

Overall this lesson went well and the students understood what they were learning about and they had their chance to write their own poem.  As far as I could see they were doing a great job and I will collect them tomorrow.

Langauge Arts Day Three

REFLECTION & REVISION (This part is to be included in your daily reflections after teaching the lesson. How did I feel about my lesson today? If I feel successful, what did I see the students saying and doing that made me feel that way? What changes to tomorrow’s lesson need to be made as a result of today’s class):

     Today's class was a success. The thing we did in our reading groups is that we talked about reading with expression. This was through a lot of discussion and the students wrote down answers that were suitable on the T-chart. The first thing I asked if they listened to music. I then asked sang that song in a monotone voice. I asked them if they would listen to that song and they all said "No." Then I asked the students if they would listen me to read the story with expression and on the T-chart they had to write how my reading sounded, how it made them feel, and if they liked it. While I read students were able to write down their answers. The students got the idea because they said things like, "It was fun, I liked it, and I was interested." Then I asked them to do the same thing while I read the story without any expression. The students also understood this concept because they said things like, "It was horrible, it was boring, and I was uninterested." From this, I was able to ask the students why they want to read with expression, especially when it comes to folktales and fables. The answer I was aiming for is that, "you want to keep the reader interested in order for them to learn the moral." The students got halfway there. They understood that you want to read with expression in order to keep a person interested. I then asked them if they would want to learn about a moral if the reading was boring and they all said no, so it worked better when I chopped the idea in half. 

     Our last activity that we did is that I asked them for feeling words. All of them were excited to share the different feeling words. I then prompted them to think about while I read the story in the wrong feeling expression. For example, if the character was excited, I read it in a sad voice. Once the giggles had somewhat settled, I asked them how it sounded. A lot of the students said that it sounded silly and that they were not able to pay attention to the story. I then asked them why they thought it was important to read with the right expression. The answer I was aiming for, "Is that you want it to sound right in order to convey the right feelings of the characters." The students came close and said that they wanted it to sound right. Unfortunately, they did not get to get to the other part because we ran out of time in each group. The changes that I would make in each group is time management, because I always run over by about three or four minutes and that adds up. I would also try to incorporate folktales and fables more. This lesson went great and many students understood the concept of reading with expression.

Day 3 reflection

My lesson today was a little bit more difficult than the other lessons. I think this might have been mostly caused because students are getting tired of working on their narratives. They don’t necessarily have the motivation or desire to perfect their work and make changes. I was careful to share the specific goal of the lesson in hopes of keeping the students focused. I first instructed the students in writing by sharing with them my own personal narrative. I model the pattern of setting the scene, adding details and explanation, and ending with a take a way lesson. I also instructed them on editing before they were given work time. This meant that all students had something to work on. Some were writing and others were editing. It was difficult to get them interested in making their papers better. Since there were at least 25 students in each class I had to keep moving around the room.

The reading section of the class was a little different today. We finished with questioning and instead practiced a chain of events. I modeled the chain of events using my own personal narrative. The students then made a chain of events while I read “Stellaluna” to them. In the first section we were rushed for time and in the second section I over compensated. We were left with a few extra minutes.  Overall I think the lesson went well. Some students commented on the paper chains being something they did in art class or in second grade. I tried to take a positive spin by sharing that it would be great that they had the experience and they would definitely succeed in the lesson today. Other students were super excited to share their chain at the end of class. Some threw them out and others kept them. The main goal was to keep them thinking about the events in the story and each student tracked me as I read and completed and accurate chain of events. I was very pleased with the outcome.

Language Arts Day 3 was awesome!

Today was another great day!  The students and the classroom teacher loved the book Animilia which was used for the alliteration lesson I did today.  The students learned about alliteration using words that I gave them in an envelope and they had a lot a fun make up sentences using the words.  They did a great job with this and were helping each other to find meaning with the words.

Tongue twisters were a little challenging to teach because they understood that they needed to use a letter and alliteration, but they were not able to understand the rhythm part of the tongue twister.  This is something that I would like to work with them more on.  They can do the making sentences and alliteration portion but I would like to work on the rhythm part of it.  I took them through step by step of making the lists of the nouns, Proper nouns, descriptive words, and verbs.  This really helped for them to understand what they needed to do.  Some students were frustrated but I worked with them and they understood better.

The only thing I would change would be the noise level of the students.  They are all having so much fun making their poems but it is hard to give directions sometimes.  I used her bell system today so I will continue to use that to keep structure in the classroom.

Overall today was great! And the students were very involved hand were shooting up like crazy to test out their tongue twister skills and say their alliteration sentences.  The biggest complement I felt was the teacher asking if she could use this lesson!  That was awesome!

Day 2 of Language Arts was a success!

Today I felt like a teacher!  This was a great lesson and the students seemed to be learning a lot about evacuees during World War II.  They were all very excited about being able to become an evacuee and making up an identity for themselves!  The beginning of the lesson went well with the emotion aspect.  They were all understanding and had some great emotions that they thought the children would have.  They also connected to the fact that moving to a place they were not used to with random people would be very hard on them as well.  I had they reflecting in class about what they would think it would be like.

The hardest part for them was really thinking hard about how an emotion felt, smelt, sounded like or looked like.  They knew what a simile was but describing how a baby cries was hard and they really had to think outside of the box.  I wish they would work with each other to help out with words, but they mostly wanted me to help or the classroom teacher was walking around a little.  They did a lot of great thinking and I can’t wait to read what they wrote for their poems when I collect them tomorrow.

Something that I would change would be to add an acting component or a video clip of evacuees so they could physically see and hear people not just a photo.

Overall this lesson was great!  The students loved becoming the part and relating it to history.  They wanted to keep their identities for all of their other classes and that is exciting when they want to continue with something that I did.

Language Arts Day Two

REFLECTION & REVISION (This part is to be included in your daily reflections after teaching the lesson. How did I feel about my lesson today? If I feel successful, what did I see the students saying and doing that made me feel that way? What changes to tomorrow’s lesson need to be made as a result of today’s class):

     Today went really well, I could actually feel the learning. In all three groups we discussed what morals are. We went through the definition and then we talked about the moral of each story they are reading. The first activity I did was to copy down the definition. This I learned takes students a long time. I think, if I were to do this again, I would have the definition already written down for them. The reasoning for this is because this is not really a higher order thinking, it is more of a recalling aspect. Plus, the students were able to give plenty of examples of morals, but they could never get the exact definition. This is where drill and kill comes into play, and I can see why teachers use it. As a teacher, you want the students to learn the content, but you want them to get the right answer because it is important to their lives, like morals. The second part we went through the moral of the story. This went well because I did a lot of guiding and questioning in order to get the students to the answers. Morals are tricky to teach because a book can teach people many different lessons. The students could not think of other morals the story taught them when I said that one moral a student said could be the answers. Next time, I will have the students write down what they think it is first and then discuss the story. The last part was where the students had to come up with their own morals that they follow. A lot of the answers were "Be kind or nice" or "Don't lie" I know there are many more, but these are ones that are common. When we do this activity again, I am going to have the students try to come up with different morals other than this. Overall, this was a successful lesson, and the teacher even carried on with it during RTI time.