After engaging in planning and teaching my first ELA lesson last week and learning some valuable “do’s and don’ts” I was ready to take on ELA again this week! My co-op suggested that I try a small group activity while the grade twos participated in their daily 5! This idea really excited me since it would be my first guided reading lesson! Being enrolled in ELNG 310 at the University this semester has taught me a lot about how a small group activity should be led.
For my lesson this week I wanted the brief beginning of the lesson to be myself and the students discussing and showing examples of this week’s topic, and then the rest of the allotted time would be left for the student’s to do an individual activity. Since I wanted my student’s to work on their own within the small group, I wanted my focus for the lesson to be an in-depth exploration of something they are already familiar with – words with a long A sound! We began by identifying the vowels and differentiating the short and long sounds for the letter A. I asked my students to give me examples of words they could think of that have a long A sound. I wrote down the words they gave me and made sure to sort them by their spelling attribute! For this lesson I focused on the four main spellings of a long A sound which are ai, a_e, ay, and a. Once my students were familiar with the different spellings I explained their task for the lesson.
Each student was provided with a worksheet I made titled “READ IT, WRITE IT, STAMP IT.” In front of the students was also a container with long A sound words and a pack of colorful alphabet stamps. I asked my students to pick a word out of the container and to say it out loud to themselves (I would ask students to repeat the word if they were forgetting this step) before gluing the paper in the first column of their worksheet. Students were then to write the word in pencil in the next column before using the stamps to spell out the word in the word. Using simple instructions and a straightforward activity made it easy for my students to dive right into their word work for the short ten minute station. I repeated this lesson four times with groups of six students and I believe it went splendidly! Participating in small groups meant that I could really observe and focus on the work of each student as well as have intimate conversations with the students while they worked. I am so proud of the work my grade twos accomplished and I even left a pack of stamps behind so that they could finish their worksheets at a later time!
Click here for this week’s PDP!
Student work:
These past seven weeks of pre-internship have flown by! Saying goodbye to my amazing students and co-op teacher was not easy! I am so grateful for the amazing placement I have received and cannot thank Mrs. Grand and my students enough for giving me such a safe and welcoming classroom environment to learn in! Being in the classroom for three weeks in March is going to be AWESOME! I look forward to tackling unit planning for the three-week block as well as continuing to challenge my comfort levels with other subjects!
Wishing everyone a safe and happy holiday season!
Miss Hansen