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.