Dokho Reflection 2

Dokho Reflection 2- Word Knowledge with Homophones

Originally I planned on only giving my students a quick review of homophones because they had previously learned about them in a different class. I ended up having to clear up some misconceptions that my students had about homophones and redefine them because my students were slightly confused. This helped my learning goal because by the end of my short lesson my students had a really strong definition of what a homophone is, they had written examples and more detailed examples from their posters. My students enjoyed coloring and creating posters for their homophones. All three of my students are relatively mild mannered so they didn’t have any problems sharing or using materials the right way. I had the students share their posters with each other afterwards, which I wasn’t going to originally do. I think that sharing the posters added more words and references to their schemas about what homophones are. Now when they need to use homophones again, they have at least three solid examples and visual representations that they can refer back to.

A strength of my lesson was that it involved a bunch of small activities within one large activity. There was a group discussion, independent work time, and presentations. I thought that the variety was good because it let different students shine at different times. For example, Stacy doesn’t talk much out loud but she really enjoyed coloring and working on the poster. Plus, I could see that she had been paying attention during the group discussion because her poster was complete and accurate. A limitation of my activity was that it was easy for students to get wrapped up in the drawing and coloring aspect of the lesson. I asked my students to illustrate the homophones that they were representing so that they could see how they sound the same but have different meanings. Though the coloring part was important, it wasn’t the most important. I had to monitor how much time I allowed them to work on their illustrations or else we could have been there for an hour.

I noticed that I was able to provide a lot of different examples for the students about what homophones were. This made me happy because it means that I was able to use my prior knowledge to teach, and that is something that I should be doing in my own classroom everyday. I wonder if this lesson would be as effective if I did it with the whole class. It might be more beneficial to do some other type of activity such as writing a story or a play based off of the different homophones. It might also work to have this lesson be more of a homework assignment after the initial lesson about homophones. Then the posters could be brought back in and hung up around the room.