Hawes Lesson 3 Reflection

Lesson 3 Reflection

My objectives for this lesson were: 1. Practice and apply understanding of reading comprehension strategies such as: main idea and details, monitor and clarify, visualizing and compare and contrast by participating in class discussion and 2. Develop oral vocabulary by defining and giving examples for words such as: hatch, pecks, cuddles, snuggles, preen, flippers, frozen.

The vocabulary words seemed to be easy for the students. This time I tried something different with the vocabulary words. Instead of just asking them to tell me the definitions, I had students volunteer to act out the vocabulary words and other students would raise their hands to guess what one they were acting out. The words this week were easy to act out in comparison to other week’s vocabulary words so this was a good way to switch up the vocabulary portion of my lesson. They seemed to really like it and all of the students who acted out and who guessed were able to do so with success so that tells me that they actually understand the vocabulary words instead of just being able to spit out the exact definition they have heard me say before. I would like to try other vocabulary activities in the following weeks as well. The comprehension strategies of visualizing and comparing and contrasting are the ones I think my students understand the most. These have been taught before (spiral curriculum) this year and going over them again during this lesson confirmed my idea that they do understand these concepts. We also added to them when we were building background knowledge for the text of the week (Penguin Chick). The other two comprehension strategies were new this week and they are having some difficulty with them. This is only the second day I have taught these and so far we haven’t had much practice. Much of the practice will come in tomorrow’s lesson when we read the story with comprehension questions.

I learned that my students are awesome at having class discussions! I feel so lucky to have this class because they are awesome at responding to my questions, responding to each others questions, and asking questions of me and other students. It flows so nicely and they have so much to say that I often had to stop to let them share with a partner in order to get all of their ideas out. There was a lot of chatter during the lesson, but the talking was on-task so at least I know they were interested in the conversation and were excited to share their ideas.

I will continue teaching main idea and detail and I will try a few different explanations and activities and hopefully they will understand it by the end of the week- at least a basic understanding. I will do center work with kid-friendly news articles (Time Magazine) and have them work with a partner to find the main idea and three details. I will also have them do some practice worksheets as a whole group and individually.

If I were to teach this lesson again I would have more scheduled time for partner sharing and I would also add in a short activity at the end where they can write one thing they learned from the story, one thing they liked about the story, or one thing that relates to the story and themselves that they would like to share with me. This way they will feel like I want to hear their ideas even if I can’t let them all share aloud during the lesson.