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.