Today in The Learning Academy we were in the classroom on a Friday instead of a Wednesday because of Veterans Day. It was strange being in the classroom on a Friday instead of a Wednesday but it was still fun. The students started the day off with their morning work. The kids worked diligently and quietly. The students worked hard to get all of their morning work done and move onto their first lesson. The kids had a writing prompt for their journal this morning and I thought the question was very entertaining. The kids had a big discussion on it, they were that into the question. The question was, “would you rather not be able to talk at Thanksgiving dinner or not have dessert?”
Ms. Swan verbally praised a student for cleaning up their cubby so nicely the first time that she asked and he was very excited about this. You could tell by the student’s reaction that he was excited that something that he did was noticed for once. Ms. Swan then showed the class a picture of her dog Oliver because they love hearing stories about him and his daily life. Afterwards, the entire school had a fire drill and it went very smoothly. The older students started talking towards the end but they still managed to get outside in a short amount of time.
Today I also presented my lesson on main idea. I focused on incorporating every level of Bloom’s Taxonomy Wheel to induce higher order of thinking in the classroom. The students also had to write something of their own and create their own story which was also using Bloom’s Taxonomy Wheel. My lesson went well for the most part. I forgot the smartboard presentation that I had created ahead of time but I was still able to complete the lesson. The presentation would have just helped benefit the students with the vocabulary more. I had the students look at objects that were in a bag and as each object was pulled out of the bag, the students discussed what each object is and how they can relate to a story. After they pulled out all of the objects I asked the students what they thought the big idea is. The objects all related specifically to the story Tidy Up, Trevor the students just didn’t know it yet. Then the students had to write their own story using the objects that we discussed. Afterwards, I read the book Tidy Up, Trevor to the students and they saw how all of the objects that we looked at before created the main idea of their story and the original story.
After I was finished with my lesson, Ms. Swan compared and contrasted the story that they wrote to the two types of texts, literature and informational text. I thought that this was cool because it made me feel that my lesson was good and helped teach the students something new and that they need to learn. Then the class talked about books and books being turned into movies. The students couldn’t fathom how the producers will take out some of the important details and main ideas and change the plot of the story to create a good movie. I enjoyed talking about Twilight and Harry Potter with the students. The class had a 10 minute long discussion about books that they’ve read that have been turned into movies. The kids really got into it. When they were done with this Ms. Swan was so happy with how they had been acting the entire morning the students got to have a mini dance party. So the class danced to dance puppy dance and then ate their snack. Then I did a math lesson with a small group and helped them on their math problems.
Jackson wasn’t in school today because he had broken his collarbone playing football earlier in the week. I had planned on doing a cold read of a DIBELS reading text and then going over the words that Jackson would have struggled with and reading the passage together. Then after we were done with that I was going to give him a hot read and see if his fluency improved at all. I was looking forward to doing this because I wanted to get an idea as to what his reading fluency is really like but because he wasn’t here, I couldn’t do it with him. Instead, I worked with the other student that Tia and I was given to work with. I did what I had planned with Jackson with Max. When he first read the text, he only read 46 words per minute. He struggled with the words Asia and village. After I went over these words and described what they were for Max, we read the text together. After we read the text together, he re-read the text and read 74 words per minute. I asked him questions after he read the text to see if he understand and was comprehending what he was reading. The second time around he only struggled with the word ourselves and since. Max had almost a 30 words per minute increase in his reading after being given the chance to re-read the text. This shows me that his fluency is at a decent rate and not as low as a cold read can present it at.