On the first day of teaching I was a bit nervous but after looking back and reflecting on the events I can see how beneficial all of the choices were and how my students and I were able to learn and grow.
This was the first day of the fifth grade’s “genre unit” curriculum. The students were able to make a personal connection to the concept of change that will be present in all of the texts that we will read during the unit. Students were able to make a personal connection in their own lives prior to reading these texts. They gained valuable experience with the writing process as I had them doing a writing and beginning to edit it. I know that making real world connections allowed our students to better relate to the characters in the books because they will better understand the situations that they experience. So overall, students were preparing to make text-to-self connections. The students that struggled with this were the students who have struggled with the writing process in the past. The writing topics our students have had so far are: my special place, turkey writing, and a haunted house writing so this was a more difficult and personal topic than we had ever presented our students with.
The main goal of the lesson was to allow students an opportunity to make a connection with the theme of change. I did , however, learn about how my students approach the writing process as I coached many one-on-one through their brainstorming. Although this wasn’t a goal of my lesson I feel that I have a better understanding of their thought process when beginning a writing.
I have begin conferencing with students while showing them their corrected papers. I spend about 5-10 minutes whenever I can throughout the hectic days with each students to discuss their writing, what the challenges seemed to be, their strengths, weaknesses, and set a “writing goal” with them for their next writing piece. I have a large table in the back of the room near my desk and this is wonderful for having writing conferences with my students. I call students to work with me when they have silent reading time, have finished their work, or during any other times that I feel conferencing would be appropriate throughout the day. Conferencing is something I will do with all of my students because since it is still so early in the year, I feel that they all need “additional support” in some category or area of their writing; they can improve in some way.
If we were to teach this lesson again we would go over the revising and editing process with the students and what it means to revise and edit (we have added this in red to our lesson plan). We feel that this would help the students have a more meaningful revising and editing process because we noticed that some students only make a few changes for revising and editing and then are ready for their final draft. We think the peer- editing lesson tomorrow will help with this, but we also want our students to be able to revise and edit their own work to make their writing stronger without having to always rely on their peers to help them. We think this change in the lesson would help to strengthen students’ final drafts.
I think having our students do a writing on “change” before even reading the story was very helpful to our students. Before even reading the book they were able to relate to it. Often times teachers ask students to make text-to-self connections while reading, which can sometimes be difficult on the spot. Having the students already connect to the characters before even reading the story prepared them for what was going to happen and also helped them to connect to the main character right away. They felt more involved in the book because they had a way to relate to the character right away. This is an idea I will keep in mind for the future. I may not always have them write a paper to relate to the story, but I could have them do a quickwrite, a discussion with a partner, a small group discussion, or even a class discussion based on a topic that I give them that I know will help them relate to the character and the story.
ReplyDeleteI agree that this was the most difficult topic for our students to write about so far this year. They had to think about personal experiences and how they were affected by these experiences. They had to be able to use details about their life and put them into words, which was difficult for many students. There were some students who did struggle, but they all were able to eventually think about a time that they dealt with change. I found it interesting that many of them talked about moving schools as dealing with change. Another popular topic was when they mom had a new baby. These papers were not only helpful to the students to make connections to the book, but they were also helpful to me because I was able to learn about my students and things they have experienced and how they feel about it. It’s always nice to learn more about students and their personal lives. I think it helps as a teacher to know some of those things.
I like that you are finding time to conference. It’s been difficult with my class as you know everything in my room takes longer than your room due to all of the behavior issues that we have. I hope to see start conferencing with my students because I think giving each student a writing goal will be very helpful to them. I’m going to talk to my CT tomorrow to see how we can fit this in even if it’s only a few students each week. Some time is better than no time and I feel it is so important to conference with the students.
Since we discussed what went well with our lessons and what we think we need to improve upon together, I agree with everything that you said for what to do if we were to re-teach this lesson. I think the revising and editing process is so hard for our students that it would be extremely beneficial to go more in depth with this and model it more for our students. I feel they would greatly benefit from it. Revising and editing is something that students will need to be able to do throughout their educational lives so it is very important that they start practicing now and learn how to look at their work with a critic’s eye. I think we can certainly focus on this as we enter the next genre unit with our students.