Elm School Work JournalStudent Teaching – April 2013

Tuesday, April 16This was a very busy day with lessons and my first site visit. There were two special Kindergarten reading groups that came in during the morning and afternoon sessions. We read the story Clever Jack Takes the Cake by Candace Fleming. A 45 –minute Kindergarten lesson is long and I wanted to break up the time by incorporating an activity that would have the 5 students help me “review and illustrate” what we heard in the story. I had set up a dry erase board with a basic picture of the setting and was going to call on the students to help me fill in the details. I thought this would be not only a good activity to have them recall events, but also one that allowed them to call only multiple intelligences and also have a chance to move around and get out some of their “wiggles”. As it turns out, the students and I did a lot of discussing and sharing during the story, but we ran out of time before we were able to move to our other activity. I think this might be the “norm” for this lesson, and can see, based on the level of engagement by this small group, why it happens, but I wanted to try to change it for the afternoon lesson. When the afternoon group came it, we seemed to be moving more swiftly through the story – still having meaningful conversations and making connections to other texts and personal experiences, but with fewer distractions – until the fire alarm went off! When we returned to the building, we had time to finish the story, but again, did not get to the activity. I think that without the drill, we would have managed it and I’m glad to have had the second opportunity to teach the lesson so I could make some modifications and improvements in the timing of the lesson, the pace I set for the kids in terms of discussion and reflection, and how I moved them along through the story.

I also did 2 first grade Internet safety lessons. The first lesson felt like a bit of a disaster. I had prepared a PowerPoint to share with the kids and also had a video clip I wanted to show them on Internet safety. Though I had practiced my lesson and timed how long each component would take, I could not account for or factor in the impact of student input on the timing of the lesson. It was important to me that each of the students be heard and have a voice, but as a result, I only made it about half way through my lesson! I knew I had to make some changes for the second lesson and decided, based on the discussion that surfaced after the initial 5 or 6 slides, that much of what I had planned to share with the students was redundant and that they understood the message after the first few slides. Without stunting the discussion related to those slides, I was able skip several slides and move on to other concepts. I think I was also better at managing how many kids got to share and keeping the lesson moving. Without negatively impacting my objectives or lesson, I was able to get to all of the topics I wanted to discuss

while still managing the time. I was actually very pleased and proud with how much I was able to adapt and be flexible in my second lesson to improve issues with timing, discussion and overall length of the lesson – all on the fly!