What did students learn and which students struggled with the lesson?
Students practiced pre-reading strategies. They are learning how to make the text meaningful. We connected the text, Flat Stanley, to prior knowledge by visualizing what it would be like to be flat. What could you do flat? What couldn’t you do? Also students explained how they became flat…it was a riot. They came up with some hilarious flattening situations.
Students also learned about thick and thin questions. They applied these questions to the reading and then decided with their group which thick questions would help us understand the text best. Since currently this has been a group effort, it’s easy to see that at least some students really understand it…it will be hard to identify strugglers until getting back tomorrow to look at their personal thick questions (they are going to sticky thick questions in their IDR book today and tomorrow).
I did have behavioral strugglers. We talked about proper reader and listener behavior and several students were still off task, even after reminders. I haven’t got to the big content of my unit yet (brainstorming, letter writing…), once I do I’ll better be able to identify how students are doing. Basically, so far all we’ve done is read Flat Stanley (that and a pre-reading activity).

What are alternate reads (interpretations) of your students’ performance or products?
Indeed. During group reading sessions, I had a group where the following behaviors were observed: listeners not looking at the reader/book, listener playing with the plant, staring off into space. Now, conventionally I would see then and think that there’s no way that student is paying attention. But I wondered if perhaps that was how this student listened best…with something to occupy her hands. The same thing goes with doodles, I saw a handful of students doodling during group reading until expectations were reinforced. Only a select few students actually doodle to pay attention though, and my suspicion is that most of these students were just genuinely off task…expect for plant girl maybe. Again, I’ll better be able to read my students’ performances and products once there are more of them.

What did you learn about your students’ literacy practices that extend beyond your objectives?
Until this point I had only worked with my reading three reading groups. An ELL group, an at level group, and a group of higher readers. I did not know what groups below a P reading level looked like. Now I do, and although I suppose I should have surmised what that would look like, in reality I was caught off guard a bit. I learned about the incredible imaginations that my student’s weave into their learning everyday. I think sometimes we forget about this as teachers.



When and how will you re-teach the material to students who need additional support?
I kind of already had to make one revision for this. The group readings were taking way to long so I did a mini-mini-mini lesson on what being a good reader and a good listener looks like and then proceeded to read the book myself to the class, with groups following along in their book.
If I need to reteach the letter writing material to any students…it will depend on who the student is. If they are in my reading group then I will continue to work on that skill with them during group. If not, then it might become a morning work activity or maaaybe could become integrated to my teammate’s official “writing” time block.
Again, how to re-teach will depend on who and how many. I’m thinking a small group would be the most beneficial way to help students.

If you were to teach this same lesson again, what would you do differently and how do you think the changes would improve students’ learning?
For my initial pre-reading activity, I think everything went well. The only minor change that I would make is making the expectation clearer for what I wanted them to write down. There was a section where they were to sketch a drawing, and then three other sections where I was expecting text. Some students got stuck in a drawing mindframe and gave me pictures for all four sections. I could still evaluate their thinking, but it just wasn’t what I expected. I would make that clearer next time.
As far as the group reading went. I would have spent more time initially on what being a good reader and good listener looks like. I had them write their predictions in there notebooks which was good, but made it hard for me to assess if they were predicting or not. It would have been cool to have groups present these predictions to each other, but there simply just isn’t time for that. But by spending more initial time on what being a good reader/listener looks like I think that students learning would have been improved because we could have gotten done with that part it the unit more quickly providing more time for the post-reading/letter writing part of the unit…which I now feel like I have to try to squeeze in before Thanksgiving.

Reflection on Three Lessons

1. What did students learn and which students struggled with the lesson?

Through my first three lessons of the Legends unit that I taught, my students were able to learn about three different legends stories, The Legend of Michigan, The Legend of Sleeping Bear, and The Legend of Mackinac Island. As part of the activities that the students did for every Legends lesson, they learned about the components that make up a legend story: the title, main characters, the plot, magical/mythical events, the setting, and the concept or idea in nature that the legend explains. They were able to identify these components in each of the legend stories and apply them to a legends matrix worksheet to organize and compare each of the stories. A few students struggled while listening to the stories because they became unfocused on the story and were disrupting the students who were sitting next to them. I quickly got the students focused again by separating them and giving them a warning. Also, a few struggled with writing the information into the legend matrix worksheet because they were slow writers. I was able to help them by freezing the image of my worksheet on the document camera and handing the worksheet to the students who were slower at copying the information so they could see the document up close. This seemed to help them catch up.

2. What are alternate reads (interpretations) of your students’ performance or products?

Through my three legend lessons, I was able to see that my students sometimes have a difficult time sitting at the rug and listening to a story book for a long period of time. They can get distracted fairly easily with snacks, water bottles, wrappers from their snacks/water bottles, poking each other, etc. I made it a point to remind them to sit next to a person who they will not be easily distracted from before I began reading every time. Also, in one of my legend stories, there were pictures of naked fairies, which really set the students off! They were saying “Ewww!” and “That’s disgusting!” I had to remind the students to keep their comments to themselves and that the fairies were part of the legend. I probably should have addressed the “naked fairy images” before I began reading so it wasn’t such a shock to the students and a disruption to my reading.

3. What did you learn about your students’ literacy practices that extend beyond your objectives?

I learned that my students love listening to new stories and seeing new illustrations. For the most part, they loved the illustrations in the stories and how the illustrator interpreted the stories and created the drawings and paintings to follow along with the story. They were able to make text-to-text connections to some of the legend stories because some of the stories would incorporate other elements from the other legends that we had read (for example, one legend incorporated Lady Slipper flowers in the background and a student raised her hand to point out the flowers because we had read The Legend of the Lady Slippers previously).

4. When and how will you re-teach the material to students who need additional support?

For the students who need additional support, I will meet with the students during free time or recess to go over the stories and reread any information that was necessary for the legend matrix worksheet. I will make sure that they are able to identify the legend components in each story because this is a necessary skill that they need to master in order to create their own legend story (the final writing project that the students will do at the end of the unit).

5. If you were to teach this same lesson again, what would you do differently and how do you think the changes would improve students’ learning?

To be honest, I don’t think I would change much if I were to re-teach my lessons again. I thought they went very well – the students were able to identify the components in each story, they were very interested in the stories, they correctly filled out their matrix worksheets, and seemed very motivated to write their own legend stories. I feel that I have achieved all of the objectives that I created for each lesson and that the students have comprehended most everything that I have taught. In the future, something that I could change is to be a little more prepared for catching students up that were absent during a lesson. A few students missed a day where we read a legend story and filled in a section of the matrix worksheet. When they came back the next day, they had to fill in two sections of the matrix and this made them be a little behind the rest of the class. For future lessons, I should photocopy the sections that they missed and have the students glue them into their matrix so they are not so far behind the rest of the class.

Lesson Reflections

Overall I think that all of my students learned from my lessons. One of the biggest struggles I encountered was getting all 50+ students to listen and pay attention during the large group parts of my unit. The lesson plans that I wrote and turned in were for the first 3 days of my unit. My CT feels very strongly that when you are starting a new unit, you have to find some way to “hook” the kids’ attention. Thus, one of the major focuses of these lessons was to get the kids excited and interested in my unit. I guess I should stop here and tell you all what I’m doing- I wrote an author study about Roald Dahl. Basically, I chose three books and split my 52 kids into three groups within which they will focus on one particular book. For my first lesson, I read a biography about Roald Dahl and a short excerpt from a Roald Dahl book to the kids. I was pleasantly surprised with how well this went over. Reading the excerpt from the book seemed to really get the kids going. They were so anxious to find out which book they would be reading, and then after they did, they were excited to begin reading. I have always enjoyed reading, but I feel like the majority of people I know don’t like it as much, so I wasn’t expecting as much enthusiasm as I got. For my second lesson, I had the kids make predictions about what they thought their book was going to be about based off the title, front and back cover, and back excerpt. Since the book my group was reading has a picture of the characters on the front and back cover, most of my kids made predictions about the characters, instead of the entire book. I’m not sure this is a bad thing, as it shows that they were really paying attention to the covers. To make sure that my kids really understand predictions, I will be stopping them at many other places throughout the unit and asking them to predict what might happen next. This will give them more practice.

One thing I would for sure do differently next time is to include the biography on the author information worksheet. This time around, I read the biography and then had students answer a couple questions. This was problematic because many kids couldn’t remember the answers. I feel a little silly for not anticipating this, but I think that giving the students a copy of the biography to look back on next time would really help them. There isn’t anything wrong with looking back, and this would force all students to answer every question, as this time around I allowed the students to only answer what they could remember and then we discussed the rest of the answers as a large group (thus, leaving some kids to fall behind and zone out).

I am still not completely done with this unit, but so far it’s been going pretty smoothly! The kids are just starting to read the books, so I am anxious to hear their thoughts.

Three Lessons - Reflection

1. What did students learn and which students struggled with the lesson?

After teaching my three consecutive literacy lessons, I am able to conclude that the majority of students learned what the reading comprehension strategy of visualization is. Furthermore, I think my students learned how to use the strategy, visualization, to help them better understand and enjoy what they read. For most of my students, using visualization while reading was a strategy they were introduced to in second grade. I assessed my students understanding of this concept by looking at their use of textual support to describe their mental pictures. Throughout these lessons, I had three students who struggled with the concept of visualization. They continued to say that they were not able to create any mental pictures while I read the text to them. They said their minds were blank while listening to the text being read to them. When I pulled these students aside, I had them practice closing their eyes and to really focus on the words and phrases the author uses in the story. This seemed to help them understand how visualizing works. I also made sure to read each of the words slowly and with inflection in my voice. That way, these students could really hear the words emphasize in a way that would support their visualizing.

2. What are alternate reads (interpretations) of your students’ performance or products?

My students were able to support the drawings of their mental pictures by listing the helpful words and phrases from the text. These words and phrases came directly from the text and they supported the students visualization process, which was apparent in their drawings. Underlining the text and then generating a list of those words/phrases took the visualizing process to another level. Students were not only asked to draw what they saw in their minds, but also refer back to the actual text and author's words for support. As far as working together well and being respectful of one another, we are still working on that. My students performance during whole group discussions and partner discussions need a little more practice. Although my students have made tremendous improvements in respecting our community of learners, we need to work on being good listeners while others are speaking.

3. What did you learn about your students’ literacy practices that extend beyond your objectives?

After teaching these three lessons, I learned a little about my students’ literacy practices which extend beyond my objectives. I learned that my students are enthusiastic about drawing and coloring pictures to express their ideas and thoughts. They demonstrated intrinsic motivation when I told them they were going to be drawing their mental pictures. My students could not wait to express their ideas and thoughts through artwork. I also learned that my students need work on their listening skills. Listening is a skill which needs to be modeled, taught, and practiced. In order to continue to progress into more student led discussions, my students need to practice listening skills.

4. When and how will you re-teach the material to students who need additional support?

For these three lessons, I did not have any students who needed to have the material re-taught to them. However, as I mentioned above, I had three students who were confused during the lesson. I pulled these students aside during the second lesson (students drew their pictures in this lesson) and talked to them in a small group setting. After a few minutes and an exercise which involved closing their eyes, these students began to understand what visualizing meant and how it could be used. One of them even said they used visualizing all the time while they read; this student used the strategy naturally and did not even realize it. That was the case for a handful of my students. Some of them used visualizing naturally while they read, while others needed to think and focus in order to consciously use the strategy.

5. If you were to teach this same lesson again, what would you do differently and how do you think the changes would improve students’ learning?

If I were to teach these three lessons again, I do not think I would do much of anything differently to be honest. I was very happy and impressed with the way my lessons went. The students did an excellent job and I feel as though they met the learning objectives for the lessons. I have even created a bulletin board outside of our classroom to display my students beautiful artwork and textual support examples. The bulletin is all about how they visualized to help them better understand the book, Cherries and Cherry Pits. The one thing I would do differently, however, is be more strategic about which students are partners during partner discussions and shares. I thought my students could handle being paired up at random, but they need some more guidance next time. I think this simple change would improve all students' learning because students would be less apt to talk out of turn and be disruptive. The ability to stay on task would positively influence partner and whole-group discussions.