Last week we hit the mother load of lesson planning. My co-teaching partner and I planned and co-taught three lessons in one day. Planning and teaching three lessons may have been difficult a week prior, but we were ready to tackle the challenge.
We ended up teaching a writing lesson first. The fourth graders in our class are gearing up for the Florida Writes Exam and are frequently practicing expository and narrative writing. We edit several stories of theirs a week and noticed that some of their stories were missing a certain sparkle. The need to fulfill the minimum number of paragraph and sentence requirements was overshadowing their ability to add detail to their stories. In response to this, we taught the students a mini lesson on the importance of adding detail to your writing along with some helpful pointers and examples. We explained that detail helps the reader visualize their stories more clearly. My co-teaching partner thought of a great method to explain how to add detail to the students. She wrote a very basic sentence on a poster board and asked the students who, what, where, when, and how questions in order for them to help her add information to the sentence. I followed her lead with another sentence. I also told the students to utilize the many vocabulary words that are posted throughout the room. The words are excellent resources to spice up their writing. After the demonstration, the students worked with a partner, then independently, to fix sentences in stories that they had written previously. The students seemed very engaged throughout the lesson, and hopefully their writing this week will reflect that.
Following the writing lesson we taught a review lesson in social studies. This lesson was also taught to the fourth graders. It was more of a game format. The students were in three teams and were asked questions that related to the chapter they were going to be tested on. If they answered correctly, their team was able to role dice to determine the number of spots their team would move on a giant chutes and ladders board. This lesson made me wonder how effective playing review games is. Is it more effective than having the students look over a study guide? Furthermore, can you teach students study skills or are study habits innate qualities?
Lastly, my co-teaching partner and I taught our pathwise lesson to the fifth graders in our class. We chose to teach a math lesson, so our teacher asked us to teach the students a lesson on prime and composite numbers. The textbook version of the lesson was very confusing even for us. So, we decided to start from scratch. We used some of the information in the textbook lesson as a resource, but we created our own powerpoint lesson. We taught the students the key vocabulary and concepts and had the students gradually participate more (I Do, You Do, We Do approach). We assessed the students with independent worksheets at the end of the lesson. The main portion of the lesson was a group activity in which the students had to sort prime and composite numbers. They had to work together. Some of them assigned certain numbers to each other and checked them over together once all of the numbers were sorted. I thought it was a very useful activity that helped solidify the material. It made me wonder about the pros and cons of group work in the classroom.
Ultimately, last week was filled with several exciting moments, wonderings, and one particularly busy day.
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