Week 7: Sixth Day in the Classroom

Week 7: Sixth Day in the Classroom

Date: Thursday, October 14^th, 2021

By: Monica Schrank  

I had an eventful day observing and being in the classroom again with the students. The students were quite hyper and kept getting distracted during the lessons. My MT thought of a great way to help the students release some energy by playing verb charades. We all went outside and one person would pull a verb from the bucket. That student would act out the verb and would pick on someone to answer what they thought the student was acting out/what the action verb was. The students were really engaged and focused during this activity. I realized how important it is to have the students have “brain breaks” or do fun activities to get the students moving too, which can help them to be more focused and ready to learn.

The students today were able to use Nearpod for the first time this year (which was my first time seeing it being used too). My MT was having the students find text evidence that would help them answer the given questions in Nearpod on their tablets. The teacher had complete control of what would show on the students’ screens which I thought was a really good idea. This way all the students would move on to the next question together and the students would not be allowed to move ahead and start working on the next question. The students have to get their response approved by the teacher and if the students did not provide enough evidence from the text to answer the question, their response would be declined. After seeing how Nearpod works, I would like to use this application in a lesson because it is a different way of keeping the students engaged, making sure they get the right answer (making corrections if they did not), and making sure that everyone moves on to the next question at the same time.    

For the Daily 5 for this week, the students were practicing more on textual evidence by filling out a chart about the main idea of the story and finding certain textual evidence supporting the different topics surrounding the main idea. For example, the students were reading a story called Super Storms, which talked about thunderstorms, tornados, hurricanes, and blizzards. The students started out by focusing on the whole text by following me as I showed them how to find textual evidence and how to fill it in in the chart, which was the first box and was the direction instruction of the mini lesson. For the second box, we worked on finding the textual evidence as a group, which was the guided practice. For the third box, I gave the students the opportunity to find the textual evidence by themselves and turn to share it with a partner, which was the independent practice. We also learned how to focus on one topic, such as hurricanes, and find different textual evidence that explains what hurricanes are while focusing on one section in the book rather than the whole story. The students followed the same format by following how I found textual evidence for a section, all of us doing it together, and the students taking what they learned to find textual evidence on their own and share it with a partner. As mentioned last week, the three groups of students that I worked with have different academic levels, so, for the second and third group, I had to explain more for those students on how to find the textual evidence. I feel like this activity was a great learning experience for me because it helped prepare me for when I teach my lesson next week. I have taught/gone over many assignments and activites with the students before, but this mini lesson, which is set up the same way as the lessons are that we teach to the students, helped prepare me to feel more comfortable and see what it is like teaching all whole (mini) lesson to the students. I am really excited to teach my lesson to the students and help them to learn more about the world around them with me being the “teacher” in the classroom!