Overall, my unit fit well with my curriculum. Student had an opportunity to look at
different genres of books and work on their comprehension skills as they
analyzed the book’s story elements. I am
very lucky to have such an amazing mentor teacher and school to work with, so I
had a lot of freedom when it came to my unit planning. I sat down with my MT and in no time we
designed an idea and I was able to take it and mold it into my own. I was able to choose all of the literature to
use, and I designed the handouts the students would be using. It was successful in that students had an in
depth look for the first time at point of view and based off their presentation,
they understand it. I believe the
structure of the lesson made it very easy to follow because of the repetitions
the students saw day by day. The
challenges came with differentiating for my struggling readers who struggled to
focus during out whole group discussion.
I was pleasantly surprised by some of these students’ work, seeing that
they completely filled out their story maps most of the time. It was amazing to see how successful my idea
of the “Book Worms” worked in their small group presentation. I also loved seeing how excited students were
when I explained their Three Little Pigs project and presentation. They loved the challenge and most worked
extremely well to prepare and present.
This was a very group oriented lesson with only some individual
work. While this is a very important
skill for the students to master, when they are tested on their comprehension,
often times they are graded independently.
With this being said, I need to still find strategies that would call
for more individual work in the near future.
I could easily continue this type of set up and keep the assignments
individual, but I was focusing on guided discussion, so that this will need to
be attempted another time.
I know that I need to continue to look at teaching writing because from
what I have seen thus far, students often resist writing. It is a very difficult skill to master, but
the process of improving this skill takes a lot of time and effort. Many students do not like practicing these
skills and so I would like to continue to focus on teaching writing and see
what kind of strategies and activities will help students to practice and be
motivated to write.
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