Teaching in the Lansing School District
can have its advantages. One of them being the freedom to teach not based on a
restrictive or really any required curriculum. Because of this, I was able to
create my unit from scratch. This was a challenge, but overall it was effective
resulting in an almost 80% average on the final assessment. The challenge for
me was learning how to expand a student’s vocabulary and deciding what aspects
of that to focus on. To do this I talked to several experienced teachers, then
did research on how to teach the concepts they suggested.
I did not have many dilemmas
besides just getting to know the 24 of the 25 students, whom are not in my homeroom
class. I have gotten to know most of the students in the class well quickly;
some of them have been absent several times so I do not know those students as
well. I enjoy my reading group very much, they have generally well behaved. I give
them much of the credit to the success of my unit because they worked hard. Success
was also due to the amount of modeling I did in throughout the unit of the
strategies they can use. I felt it was also important to let students know that
it is ok to not know what a word is, everybody experiences that. So then they
would be comfortable admitting when they do not know what a word means.
The unit did proceed generally as
expected, we did postpone a few days. Once we pushed back my lesson to do a fun
activity with affixes for Halloween and another time to have a day where the
novel they were to begin to read was introduced. I was surprised during the review
session of the unit, the students did very well, better than I expected them to
do based on what they had shown me thus far. I would like to learn how to
continue to expand their vocabularies besides adding to their vocabulary lists.
Some difficulties I had during the unit were students not being engaged when I would
be talking to one student when it was their “turn” to answer. I need to learn
to incorporate all the students as much as possible to maximize their learning.
No comments:
Post a Comment