Shaler Reflection 1

·         What did you notice about your students’ participation and learning in relation to your objectives?

 

During my lesson, my students participated in working towards my lesson’s objective by trying to find groups of words in the same word family.  They were each dealt cards.  When they got their cards, they each first looked in their hand to see if they had any words in the same word family.  If they did, then they paired those cards together.  This showed me that they could look at words and know which words were a part of the same word family.  For example, Lindsey was dealt the cards “shop” and “mop.”  As soon as she was dealt these two cards, she paired them together because she could see they are a part of the same word family.  Also, throughout the game, my students participated in working towards my objective by asking each other for words in the same word family.  For example, on one of his turns, Jordon asked Maggie if she had any cards that rhymed with “jar.”  She looked in her hand and saw the card “far” rhymed with “jar,” so she handed this card to Jordon.  Not only did the person asking for cards need to know which word family they were looking for, but the person being asked also had to know which word family to look for.  At the end of the game, I had each student share the word family cards they found during the game.  This helped my students learn about a variety of different word families.  In fact, later on during class, Jordon was working on a worksheet that had some word families on it, and he excitedly pointed out to me which word families he found.

 

·         What were the strengths and limitations of your lesson for supporting your students’ learning?

 

One of the strengths of my lesson was that it was a familiar game to my students.  Before playing the game, I asked them if they had played Go Fish before, and all of them had.  Therefore, the game was easy for the students to play because they were already familiar with the rules.  However, I used this familiarity to teach them new content through this game (word families).  Another strength of my lesson was it was engaging for the students.  Instead of having my students sit and listen to me talk about word families, they got to actually engage in finding word families for themselves.  A final strength of my lesson was the students were able to explore many different word families.  Instead of just teaching them about one word family, I included 8 different word families into my cards.  However, my lesson also had a limitation.  I made 32 cards for my game (8 different word families with 4 cards per family).  We did not have enough time to go through all of the cards.  Therefore, my students did not get to see as many different words as I would have liked.  But, the students got to see words in several different word families, so they were exploring more than just one word family.

 

·         What did you notice about yourself as a teacher?  What questions do you have?

 

After teaching this lesson, I noticed something about myself as a teacher: I am able to make on-the-spot changes to my lessons to make them more successful.  For example, I originally planned on dealing each student 6 cards.  However, the cards were so big in their hands that I changed my mind as I began dealing the cards, and I only gave each student 4 cards.  This made it easier for the students to hold the cards in their hands.  If I had given them any more cards, the students would most likely not have been able to hold onto all of the cards.  Another change I made to the game was to have students collect 2 cards of the same word family to create a group.  Originally, I planned on having the students make groups of 4 cards.  As I was making the cards, I made word families with 4 words in each word family.  However, after the students were playing the game for a couple of minutes, I realized there were a lot of cards in the center of the table, and the students were not finding groups as fast as I thought they would.  In response to this, I told the students they only needed 2 cards in the same word family to create a group, not 4 cards.  This made the lesson more successful because each student was able to find more word family groups than they would have if they needed 4 cards in each group.  At the end of the game, there were 7 different groups created between all 3 students.  Thus, I made a couple of decisions during my lesson that helped make the lesson more successful for the students.  My only question, after teaching this lesson, is: How much did my students retain from my lesson?  Since my assessment for this lesson is just an ongoing assessment, then I have no data to see if my students still remember what a word family is, which word families we learned about, and how to use word families to decode while reading.  I will be interested to continue observing them in class to see if they use any of these skills.