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.