Personal Narrative Reflection : My Experience For A Groom

How successful was the lesson? Did the students learn what you intended for them to learn? How do you know?

What specifically do you want the students to be able to know and/or do by the end of the lesson? (must align with content standard(s) above)

I went home and I asked my children to play one of the games and they liked it. The game had the students engaged because I was engaged when I was playing and so were my kids. The interesting part is that the game is that it could be challenging but that will power of passing to the next level make you keep going. The game is also fun to play and you learn at the same time. Math being a concept that many children hate because of misconception this game can make them change their mind about math concepts. It also can be great for children to interact with one another as they help each other out when they get stuck in a particular section. This activity was so fun and interesting, that I am sure that many children will like it as

Through completing this activity, I learned more than I have with any other activity I have done thus far while earning my Education Specialist degree. I had to observe a teacher and provide constructive feedback using the Framework for Teaching. This observation included a pre-conference where the teacher told me what she wanted me to pay particular attention to. It required that I observe in real-time, rather than simply using a video where I can pause frequently. I then had to analyze the data I collected during the observation, in order to determine strengths and areas for improvement that I shared during the post-conference. The teacher was a master teacher and thought the lesson went very well. She was shocked when I had some ideas for how to improve her instruction. I mentioned that students seemed fidgety, and she could incorporate more cooperative structures to get students more active in their learning. I also thought she needed cooperative roles for students when they completed their group work, that way everyone was accountable for the work.

I did this activity with 3 children. I first had them sit down while I read the book “Sort it Out” by Barbara Mariconda, after reading the book we talked about the different items that Pack rat came home with, and how his mother told him to sort them out. We discussed what items at home had to go in a particular place, for example, dishes in the kitchen, beds, in the bedrooms, toilets in the bathrooms, to list a few. We followed by talking about the types of shoes we were wearing, and the color of the shoes. How we were all wearing sneakers, and how every one was wearing a different color. I Introduced them to the Jumbo Pegs, and the Pegboards, and I went over the different colors inside the tub. I asked they what their favorite color was, and once we they had all chose their color, I asked them to grab a pegboard, and look through the container for the color they choose, and place them into the pegboard. They all started

I noticed that many students pretended to not understand and they just wanted to prolong until the class was over. I didn’t think it was necessary to repeat the video maybe more than three times. The teacher gave out the worksheet to the students prior to the video and the worksheet was going to be scored, so the teacher wanted to make sure that the students did ok. Most of the activities the teacher did for the class were limited to one activity and that was to practice with the groups, reviewing and practicing what the teacher just

Two or three mini-lesson ideas I have for beginning the year are that I have not implemented with teachers/students before are:

I want to be able to bring the dice game into a future classroom. This allowed all students to experience success and that is incredibly important. I will also be able to know other strategies for students who have autism and create a relax area in order for them to refocus. I also really liked the two meeting rugs. It allowed for movement and the students were able to refocus. Students would get up and get a white board and then go to the other rug and start writing their sight words. If the teacher only had one meeting area it would have been too much time on the floor and the students wouldn’t have focused on the activity. From the second round of practicum I will be able to bring how the teacher taught to her students. She talked to all of her students with a lot of enthusiasm and treated them equally while still knowing what they needed to work on. The teacher would expect the student to understand the concepts and would continually practice with them until they understood, “That is, students tend to give to teachers as must or as little as teachers expect of them.” (Spradlin, 2011, p. 63). She would spend one-on-one with one student each day and that was something that I found very important for each student, it allowed for them to know what was expected of them and ways to get to where they wanted to

Over the course of my semester of mentoring at Davis Emerson Middle School six lessons were taught and a final jeopardy review was completed during the final session. The topics included: respect, caring, cooperation, citizenship, punctuality, and compromise. These topics proved to be a challenge for the students, since they have never been exposed to many of these terms. Punctuality seemed to be the word that was known the least whereas caring was common knowledge. My favorite lesson was the one on caring. The game, “I love my neighbor”, incorporated in the lesson was relevant and engaged the students. Students were able to make connections they had in common through the game, which ultimately gave them a reason to care about each other. This game allowed us to even pull in the shy kids and established relationships for the weeks to come. Since the students already had knowledge of the topic, conversation flowed during the discussion time. They were able to sight attainable goals to incorporate caring in their daily lives. My mentee, Kaitlin, sighted goals such as opening doors or helping around the house to show she cares. My least favorite lesson was the one on citizenship. The game, “The line game”, involved the students organizing themselves in order according to certain criteria, such as birth month or name. This game had no connection to citizenship, which was hindering since the students already had no prior understanding of the topic. When we moved to our discussion

The lesson that I videotaped was the literature block. It covered whole group reading, phonics instruction, read alouds, and poetry. Overall, I think that the lesson could have gone better. There were many things I think could be improved, for example I have many idiosyncrasies that need improvement, and collection of student data could be better. However it is clear from reviewing this video a few times that I have really become so much more confident in the classroom. When comparing this video to ones that I have done during practicums throughout my college experience, my improvement is apparent. I am more confident, my classroom management skills have improved greatly, I am better at using higher level questioning, and flexible planning.

Today was an interesting day. During PIE, I had to covered two Bilingual Kindergarten classes. There were ten to eleven students per class. First, I read a book to the students. The book was called “Sneezy the Snowman” by Maureen Wright. While I was reading, I asked the students questions. For example, what do you think is going to happen to sneezy? I could tell that the students enjoyed the story because they had all their attention on me. Next, the students played bingo. The bingo cards had simple words such as uno, eres, or ella. I had to call the words out loud and passed by each table showing the word. The winning price was a Valentines sticker. Then the students watched two videos that made them sing and dance. They had a lot of fun learning

I personally think that my lesson went pretty well. It seemed like many people were engaged and they participated. There are things that I could have done to make the activity more challenging for the consonant digraphs and consonant blends, but overall I think the activity was fun. I felt like the students payed attention to when I was speaking at the beginning and the end of the activity, which was ideal for any lesson.

In general, how successful was the lesson? Did the students learn what you intended for them to learn? How do you know?

Our procedure often started with an introduction called “Awaken Enthusiasm”, where we asked the kids to have a review on what we learned last week and then asked them questions about our lesson this week, such as “Has anyone ever experienced…” or “Does anyone want to share…”. After that, we would break up into our natural teams and had discussion. The teacher of the class had divided the team and each instructor would have five or six kids in her team. Then the whole class would have an activity together, what we called “Direct Experience”, like planting peas, predator and prey game, and local food vs. long-distance food race game. Finally, we would pass out natural journals, which could be either a homework testing kids on today’s lesson, or drawing a poster with a slogan created by kids themselves.

I promoted learning in these sessions by presenting prepared lectures, having discussions, reviewing and reading handouts out loud and playing