Lesson Reflection 1

My first lesson focused on the purpose of my meaningful writing task for students (the meaningful task to be targeted during the unit is composing a friendly letter to the author of a book students’ liked). I wanted to start at a foundational level, so I had this first lesson focus on reasons for writing letters to other people. In order to get students thinking about purposes of letter-writing, I had them each read different letters that I created and then had them share the purpose of their specific letter. I also used a KWL chart to assess student experiences with letter-writing and to help them make self-connections between the different purposes that they may have had in the past to write letters and the reasoning behind letter-writing. To further personalize the lesson, I also had them write use their journals to write about times when they’ve written letters, to whom these letters were written, for what reasons/purposes they wrote the letters, and they types of messages they conveyed in the letters. After looking over their journals, the KWL chart, and thinking about some of their responses during the lesson, students revealed that they learned that people write letters for many different purposes. They were able to look at the individual letters I gave them and point out the reason the person had written the letter. They also demonstrated through their journal responses their understanding that writing can be used to convey a message to another person who is not present at the same place as they are. They successfully formed self-connections between the focus of the lesson and their own experiences.

However, I did find that there were a couple of students who struggled with reading the letters that I passed out to them. I paired everyone up with a partner and had them read one letter together, but I found that some students dominated the activity by taking hold of the letter and reading it inside their heads, which was no help to their partner, who was struggling with reading. I tried to tend to this by circulating different partnerships and having them read their letters out-loud to me. Also, for the independent journaling activity, some students struggled with interpreting the questions that I put up on the board for them to answer in their journals. Beforehand, I went over the questions and elicited example answers from students, but some students still struggled with the wording of one of the questions (“What messages did you convey to your reader?”). Therefore, I had to readdress and reword the question after numerous questions from students.

Alternate ways that I gauged students’ products was on the amount of depth in their responses. Students who used numerous examples in their answers showed that they were really thinking about the question asked and tying in their own personal experiences. I also relied on the ease and quickness with which they completed their journaling (and answered my questions verbally) as an alternate read of performance. Students who were easily able to verbally respond to my questions in a quick manner showed that they understood the concepts, and did not have to take a lot of time to think about what I was asking or connecting it to their experiences. Also, for students who are struggling readers and writers, I had them verbally talk about their responses for the journaling questions as I circulated the room. This helped me to gauge their understanding despite their weaknesses in the reading/writing aspect of literacy. Therefore, in regards to my students’ literacy practices, I also learned that I may need to find other ways to gauge student understanding in future lessons, since some of them need additional support in reading/writing.

For these students who need additional support, I will use the next lesson to give them opportunities to extend on the main objectives of the previous lesson. As an introductory and connecting activity, we will focus on one specific letter as a class, and will read it together, which will take off the burden of reading it individually. If I were to re-teach this same lesson again, I would do an activity similar to this. I would have us read a letter as a class together and model deciphering the main purpose of that specific letter. I would model my thinking as I read it. Then I would have students proceed onto the partnership reading of different letters. I would be sure to point out that students are to read the letter out-loud and discuss it with one another. I might have a student come up and model the process with me, using a short letter. I would also make sure that the wording in my questions used for the journaling activity were kid-appropriate, so that students would not struggle with what the question was asking. I would model answers for each question by writing it out and leave it up on the ELMO for students to refer back to when it came time for them to individually answer them in the journal. I think these changes would allow students to tackle the tasks with independence and help them to understand the meaning behind me having them do certain tasks. This understanding is crucial as it is a foundational part of my unit that students will be building off of.

So far, I learned that making sure students understand the basics and underlying meaning of writing is of crucial importance in implementing my core practice. I need to continue finding ways to reach each learner in my classroom before moving on. As we continue learning and practicing the steps in the writing process, it is important that my students understand the foundational meaning behind the practice as a whole and each step in it. They need to know this to adequately move from the different steps in the writing process. I need to make sure that I am giving students different facets with which to display their understanding of the concepts taught in different lessons.