Bondarenko-Day One Reflection

Today was my first day of my language arts unit plan. For this week the topic is narrative nonfiction. Today was mainly an introductory day where we just did an overview on what the unit is going to look like. The lesson started out with me standing in front of the class with an anchor chart with the question of the week. This week's question "How can we help people in dangerous situations?" We started by having the students brainstorm and raise their hand with ideas for me to put on the chart. I had the usual problem of only having the same students raising their hands. I handled this by having the students put down their hands that had shared and give more wait time for students who had not shared yet. Worked well, most of the students gave their idea. I was surprised that most students were able to answer the questions and stay on topic.
Next, we read a model paragraph that displayed the qualities of a narrative nonfiction. After I read this out loud I had the students circle the main characters, underline the events in the story, and then underline the author showing voice. This went OK, with it being Halloween students were a bit chatty.
After this, we went back to our question of the week and we made a new anchor chart with the topic "people helping in weather" and students had to poise questions that they wanted to investigate further. This was the most diffucit of the lesson. It was a weird question to ask it did not ask "What questions do you have about rescue workers" but "What questions do you have about rescue workers in dangerous weather." Clearly, the questions became limited and students were not really asking questions that related to the topic. If I were to re-do this lesson I would have made my own question and not went with "Reading Street's" question.
Tomorrow, we are going to continue with narrative nonficiton by students starting to write their own paragraphs. Students will also continue to investigate questions that they have about rescue workers. Since, today was an introductory day students did not turn in anything. But to help reinforce today's lesson I will recap the main points of a narrative nonfiction. Students that need extra support I will be able to conference with them during writers workshop or snack time. Students that struggled were the ones who were not able to sit in their desks during the whole lesson and could not focus.