My 1st Lesson Reflection!

After completing my social studies lesson in my clinical, I feel a lot more prepared for what social studies looks like in a classroom.  I implemented a lesson about doing things on accident and on purpose in my Kindergarten classroom.

            When I began my lesson, I felt a little uneasy.  I had been rehearsing what I was going to say and do for the past week.  When I got in front of my students, I realized that this lesson would have to be a little more flexible considering there were three students gone, some behavior issues, and overall being in the classroom with my cooperating teacher once the week before, the same week I met her. I was still unfamiliar with simple routines such as how she calls students, how they sign to go to the restroom, and how to address the noise issue.  I started out my lesson at the SMART board playing a feelings game with the characters from the television show Arthur.  I chose one student to start the game and had her choose a friend to come up next and so on.  Since this was the introduction to my lesson, there was no way all the students would be able to come up to the board, and I believe some students got frustrated at this fact.  Reflecting on this experience, I think a better way to handle this game would be to have the students show on their hands which answer to choose on the board, one, two, or three. This would have been active engagement by all of the students and allowed everyone to voice their opinion.  After the game, I introduced the silent video clip that shows a boy doing something on accident and fixing the problem himself.  The students were very engaged in this aspect of the lesson. When I posed the question whether what happened in the video was on purpose or on accident I would have rather used the method we just observed in my 277 class, which was students holding their hands up to their mouths and “blowing” the answer they wanted to share in and then all say the answer as a class, allowing every student to answer.  When I asked what the boy did to fix the accident, I should have done a turn and talk.  This would have allowed every student to reflect on this question and it may have possibly lead to a further discussion.  After the video talk, I went to the board and wrote a t-chart with “on accident” on one side and “on purpose” on the other.  I asked students to share examples of each and I wrote it on the board under the respective column.  During this time, I think the students would have benefited from me reading the words aloud and possibly having the students turn and talk when I asked for examples.  After, I gave the students an example of what they would be doing at their seats, which was looking at a problem card and writing on a piece of paper if it was an accident or on purpose and drawing a solution on how to fix it. When I released them back to their seats, there were some issues with partnering since there were absences and also with the clarity of the instructions.  The students did do very well with analyzing the photo and drawing a solution.  This was supposed to only last seven minutes, but I went over while I was helping groups and then the students were released back to the rug and shared out.

            My objective for this lesson was: “Students will be able to identify what to say when they do something by accident.  Students will also demonstrate saying how they can think of ways to fix things that happen “on accident” or “on purpose”.” I do believe I met the later objective, but I did not focus in on what to say when something happens on purpose or accident, due to the fact I abandoned my conclusion because I ran over the time limit. My assessment tool was using a checklist to see if they correctly identified the problem and drew and accurate solution based on the picture.  Over all, all but one group achieved this goal. I think it was a good assessment tool because it can be used as documentation.

            All in all, I definitely earned a lot from this experience.  I learned that I need to focus in on better time management skills, which I will do next time by having a time timer or a watch and sticking to it.  Another thing I learned was that although I used thumbs up and thumbs down for checks for understanding, which is not the only thing I have to use.  It made me feel a little overwhelmed and then I went back to having the students raise hands, which is not effective because I am not seeing if the whole class is learning.  I will use the checks for understanding tip sheet on the Wiki to better my skills with this for my future lessons.  I will also use more turn and talks and also try the “blowing the balloon” method. The major thing I learned as well was that I need to repeat instructions multiple times to be sure all students understand, especially in this grade level.  Since it was my second time meeting my CT, I do think that it was a disadvantage that I did not know all her routines or pick up on how many times I needed to give instructions. I would definitely implement this lesson again, just with the mini-lesson and workshop model.  I think it would be more effective to have this as a workshop that students visit over the course of the week and that I could work one on one with the students with it.