Bondarenko- 2nd Literacy Reflection

In today’s lesson we continued on the topic of narrative nonfiction. (We are going to be on the topic for one week.) The goal for the end of the week is to have the students have at least one narrative nonfiction paragraph. Todays main objective was to have the students pick a topic that they would want to write about. To go about this objective, I started out with having a anchor chart on the board. I drew a T-chart with and on one side was “rescue workers” and the other side was “the jobs they do.” I modeled the first example to the students which was “firefighters” and “rescue cats from trees.” This was a pretty slow moving discussion of ideas from the students. It seemed like if they knew a “rescue worker” they did not know “what jobs they do” and vice-versa. When completing this T-chart I was also pretty particular with what answers they came up with because they were going to be picking from this chart for their topic. Students who are more shy did struggle with this part of the lesson because they did not want to participate. Students who learned or excelled were the students who have prior knowledge with rescue workers (family members) or are outspoken enough to share their ideas.

The later part of my lesson was when the students learned about the beginning, middle, and end (or sequence) of a paragraph. I started with an example that was in the reading street program. I put the worksheet (which had boxes for beginning, middle, and end to be filled in) on the ELMO. I started modeling to the students how I would fill in my boxes according to my short story. I was asking the students if they understood how the beginning had to go first because if not it would not make sense. I soon realized that my story would be understandable with the middle coming first and then the first followed by the end. If I were to do this lesson over I would not use Reading Street’s example. I would use an example that clearly shows a difference between beginning, middle, and end. To show the importance of sequence. I learned that students found this worksheet more difficult than I expected. I had students work by themselves on the worksheet and myself and my MT came around to help and answer questions. I looked at almost everyone’s worksheet while they were working on it. But if I were to re-teach this lesson I would have collected the worksheets. This way, I could see the students who were struggling and I could re-teach to them. I am going to re-cap on this topic in tomorrows lesson and students will have more time to complete this worksheet and add more detail tomorrow.