PRIOR - Lesson 1 Reflection

Within this lesson, I wanted to cover achieve a few different objectives with my students: 1) Introduction to the weekly concept and question 2) Discuss four new amazing words and 3) Introduce the weekly phonics focus (V/CV and VC/V) and practice breaking apart words with students.

I would like to think that a different number of my students were able to “learn” each of my goal objectives in this lesson. I think that almost all of my students were able to fully understand our question of the week, which was, “How do the structures of plants and animals help them solve problems?” At first, some of my students were struggling with the word “structures,” so we went over this together and decided that a good synonym for structures might be “parts.” After we had this discussion, it seemed that all students were engaged in and understanding the concept talk that took place at the beginning of the lesson based on the formative assessments that I was giving during our discussion. I think that some of my students struggled with the “Amazing Words” section because a fair amount of my students are still developing their reading and vocabulary skills and have the vocabulary of a 1^st grader. This aspect of the lesson is more difficult to gauge when it comes to full-class understanding. Finally, I think that it is easy to say about 80% of my students were able to grasp the concept of the V/CV and VC/V pattern. This was a difficult pattern for them to see within the words, and we needed to do a great deal of practice with different example words.

I could tell that some students were not really getting the pattern because some were just shouting out, “This is hard!” or “I don’t really get this.” However, I can see how my students’ lack of interest in the material might have been mis-read as lack of understanding, which is easy to do in any lesson. Often times throughout the phonics lesson, I saw some students clapping out the syllables with me, but that could have just been a way to follow along without really knowing how to break the words into the pattern that we were practicing. These are all things that I need to think about when I decide how effective my formative and summative assessments are/were in whole-group lessons such as these.

My students seemed to really enjoy the phonics practice, and I can tell they prefer it to the concept talk and amazing words because it is probably more “hands-on” for them. When we do phonics, we are able to have more whole-class participation and we usually try to make a game out of it where the students have to use white boards or put the words into categories.

I will not re-teach the concept talk or amazing words because we move through these aspects of the lesson fairly quickly. However, we will revisit the phonics concept every day throughout the next week, so I will be able to re-teach my students how to find the V/CV or VC/V pattern in a word, and how to break the word into syllables. Finally, if I were to re-teach this lesson, I think that I would like to have more whole-class responses from my students when we are covering the concept talk and amazing words; however, it is difficult to do with such a limited amount of time. I am trying to introduce white boards into our lessons so that my students can all be participating in class-times such as these.