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.