Lesson Reflection

Students seemed to understand most of the lesson(s) – both in terms of content and process goals. In the introductory historical fiction lesson, students were able to apply the criteria their historical fiction webs (graphic organizers) to our read aloud book George Washington’s Socks by Elvira Woodruff. Students identified characteristics of the historical fiction genre and recorded examples of these characteristics from the text into a web of their own. In the second lesson, students were asked to use a t-chart to organize examples of “detailed characterization” from our read aloud book – and consequently make inferences about the characters’ personalities based on “details the author provided”. Students then used a blank t-chart to list historical events or time periods they were interested in writing about (as the setting of their own historical fiction writing piece), including details from the period or event in the right column – students used in class resources and background knowledge to complete these charts. Students were ALL very successful in completing this exercise. The third lesson was based on sequencing and transition words (something my CT and I have been noticing as a common weakness among many of our students). In their writing, many of our students “string” their ideas together into a paragraph-length run-on-sentence – connecting ideas with “and thens” and “so”. During this lesson, students helped me to correct a giant run-on-sentence “paragraph” similar to those I was receiving as writing samples. Students were enthusiastic about making the changes, and accurately addressed each “problem” with the passage. Students successfully eliminated “and then”s and “so”s by replacing them with more creative transitional phrases and punctuation. I am interested to see how these minilessons are reflected in their drafting in the upcoming lessons.

My CT and I both considered the trio of lessons to be received well by the students, and the vast majority of the students performed as expected during assessment discussion and activities. The students generally seem to be receptive and enthusiastic about the idea of improving their writing.

After parent-teacher and student-teacher writing conferences, my CT and I learned that many of our students feel that writing is their weakest academic skill. The lack of confidence and willingness to take risks and experiment with language was very surprising to me! Because of this, I am working hard to develop key aspects of the “writing craft” - one skill at a time. Explicit modeling of these skills, followed by guided learning practice and student-teacher (one-on-one) conferences have been essential for this group of writers. Despite the large number of above grade-level readers we have in this classroom, we have just as many low-level writers. My goal for the remainder of the year is to design lesson plans that will slowly improve students’ writing confidence, and eventually match student writing with the high-level reading we are seeing thus far.

In teaching these minilessons, I am making a conscious effort to consistently review the “crafts” we’ve learned and apply them to the skills/concepts of the current lesson. In this way, the minilessons build on one another, consistently repeating the same skills. Much of the re-teaching I will do for struggling students will be limited to conversation and examples given during one-on-one conferencing. This group of students seems to benefit immensely from one-on-one work.

I honestly wouldn’t change much of the lessons I’ve taught – students were clear on the goals of the lessons, students participated enthusiastically and applied new knowledge accurately during the lesson, and self-evaluated their learning at the lesson close. Most students continued on to apply the “craft” concepts/processes in their own historical fiction pieces. If I could re-write these lessons, I may have begun this unit with a lesson on research – more specifically, how to look up details from other time periods to aid in historical fiction writing.

Reflection of lessons

My planned lessons were in the first week of my unit, which was a reading writing connection focusing on historical fiction.  My lessons focused on identifying the elements of historical fiction books, and then using this to write their own historical fiction.  The three lessons I focused on all involved brainstorming and researching for their own writing.

            I feel that my students learned how to effectively use brainstorming strategies, specifically using t-charts.  My CT often uses t-charts (one side ideas the other expand on the ideas) to organize thoughts, so I direct modeled their use and then my students used the same strategy to develop their thoughts and ideas.  I observed a lot of my students effectively use this brainstorming strategy, whereas previously many of my students were skipping the brainstorming step altogether. 

            My bilingual students have started to get parapro support this past week, where they get taken out of our classroom for an hour each day.  Quite unfortunately, this time is during our literacy block.  Therefore, these students are the ones who are struggling the most with this unit. I have been scaffolding the brainstorming with all of my other students, starting with setting, then going to characters, then sequencing their actual narrative out.  My bilingual students instead didn’t get the whole process, and looking at their writing, many of them are writing biographys or non-fiction narratives about historical events.   Other than that, my students were struggling with coming up with historical details and then transferring that information to an actual narrative.

            I learned my students have research skills that I was unaware of.  My CT and I were planning on doing a research unit involving a persuasive paper, focusing heavily on introducing the process of researching.  However, given resources my students have show adequate ability to pull out relevant information, as well as take organized notes.  This will aid us in shaping our future research projects.

            This is a month long unit of historical fiction, so the students who need additional support understanding the genre itself will have much more opportunity to interact with the genre throughout the month.  I am also going to sit down with the bilingual para pro to give more specific expectations and objectives, so that all of my students are on the same page in the future.

            I have learned a lot reflecting upon this unit.  If I were to do these lessons again, I would wait to introduce the writing portion until after we had already thoroughly introduced the genre of historical fiction.  Having both launched at the same time I think was overwhelming and my students may have been able to better start historical fiction narratives with more experience with the genre itself first. Also, I would create a written description of the writing assignment, so my students would have a more concrete idea of their expectations.  This lack of planning on my part resulted in confusion in my students.  I might also put it later in the year, when my students have had more time to learn history (which is a part of the fifth grade curriculum), so they would have more background knowledge on historical events to use for their writings.