Lesson Reflection

This past week was my first week at fifty percent. That means I took on reading, language, and spelling. Looking back, it is funny to think that language is the subject I was least worried about teaching. I worried about the reading unit on The Great Kapok Tree, and I worried about how the students would do with their spelling words, but I had not anticipated the problem being with language.

On Monday, we went over what a noun was. Most of the students did fairly to really well on their assignment. Therefore, on Wednesday, I moved on to common and proper nouns. The students seemed to do fine with the examples we did together as a class with the Mimio. Then, when I got their papers graded, I was amazed at how terrible the grades were. Friday, we looked at their grades and held a brief review on common and proper nouns. Again, I felt they did well in the whole-class review, but their grades were not good at all on the assignment.

Looking back, I wish I had done something that was interactive with the entire class, rather than one student at a time for the rest to watch. While the students did well with the one sentence they were assigned on the Mimio, they were missing the overall picture. Next time, I will take advantage of something that will involve each student for each problem. I think at that age level, language is somewhat abstract for the students, and that makes it a difficult thing for them to study. If they are not required to pay attention to every single example, they are only benefiting from the one example they are doing, rather than the twenty-one from the whole group.