Parker: Reflection 1

Reflection 1: Phonemic Awareness and Initial “S” Blends

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

                In terms of participation, students’ engagement levels were rather high throughout the lesson.  Based on their reactions as I distributed the materials for the activity, I concluded that the type of activity I had chosen was not one similar to what they have done before.  I formatted the task so that the four students would cut and paste the pictures and words to make a t-chart, which is a format that my mentor teacher frequently uses in small-group reading lessons.  Despite that I mentioned and checked for this background knowledge in the introduction of the lesson, the boys were rather amused, as well as distracted by the scissors and bottles of glue they were handed.  I do not believe that this interfered with their mastery of the objectives of the lesson; however, I noticed myself continually reminding students of how to correctly use the supplies, instead of rewarding or scaffolding them in the completion of the task.  As I reflect, I realize that students were fully engaged in the task, but more so with their use of the materials.

                These four students are currently at a mid-first grade reading level, according to their scores on DRA assessments, so I assumed that they were familiar with the four s-blends I had chosen to work with.  Students had minimal difficulty in categorizing the illustrations; I was only required to correct students on the identifications of three pictures.  What was more challenging for this group of students was categorizing the corresponding word for each picture.  As the group was moving on to this stage in the lesson, one student exclaimed, “These words are so long! This is too hard, Miss Parker…” I noticed that other students were becoming frustrated as well, despite that they were trying to do their best in decoding the words, especially by using their favorite strategy: stretching.  From there, I mentioned the fact that the first two letters of a word could give them a hint about which column of the t-chart it belonged.  Students eventually recognized this pattern and group the words accordingly, but still had some difficulty decoding the remainder of each word.  Therefore, I could conclude that each student met the objective of identifying each s-blend and reciting the corresponding sound; however, they may still need instruction focusing on decoding multi-syllabic words.  This, of course, was not an objective for this lesson.

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

                As mentioned above, it appeared that students were more excited about using glue and scissors than they were about the actual activity.  Therefore, I can conclude that the use of these specific supplies was a limitation of the lesson.  Discussed multiple times during the duration of my education courses, the use of manipulatives and supplies can sometimes be detrimental to the mastery of lesson objectives and goals among students.  In my case, students were more concerned about how much glue they could possibly fit on the back of the pictures and words, how neatly they could cut out each word, etc.  To focus more on meeting the objectives of the lesson, it may have beneficial to only require students to place the pictures and words on a t-chart previously made, rather than gluing.  This would not only have focus students’ attention more on the topic and task, but also could have significantly decreased the duration and time of the lesson.

                Despite that students were somewhat distracted in this aspect, I felt that a strength of this lesson was the use of illustrations.  Two of these four students are English Second Language Learners.  Not only are they new to the English Language, they are also new to American culture.  The illustrations serve as a pair to the words used in the second part of the lesson, as well as introduce them to things were not exposed to them at home or in their previous culture.  A second strength that I noticed during my lesson was the use of categorizing.  Rather than randomly selecting and teaching words with initial consonant blends, I only required students to focus on four of those blends, those specifically beginning with “s”.  Because students had already seen some of these blends in the words of texts that they have read, categorizing pictures and corresponding words improves spelling, phonemic awareness, and phonics skills.  While categorizing, students recognized patterns between the spelling of a blend and the sound of that blend.  For example, while gluing the words under their corresponding pictures, students noticed that all of the words in a column of the t-chart began and sounded like the blend placed in the top row.  One student exclaimed, “Look! All of the words in this column start with the sound s-p-!”  This pattern was one of the main focuses of the lesson, which I hope they will use in both reading and writing.

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

                As I was teaching this lesson, I noticed that I have not yet mastered providing consequences for non-compliant behavior.  Despite instructing one particular student on how to use a bottle of glue correctly multiple times, he continued to use excessive amounts of glue for the pictures and words, which consequently made the glue flow onto the carpet.  I refrained from yelling at or punishing this student, but I noticed that I was regulating his behavior more than I was observing the other three students’ progress.  I refused from exclude him from the activity because of his behavior because I did not want him to lack the specific instruction; however, putting students in “time-out” is something that my mentor teacher does very frequently.  Thus, I still have questions about how to handle non-compliant behavior.  Is appropriate to remove the materials and exclude a student from the task altogether? What are some approaches tackling non-compliance but still allowing the student to be involved in the lesson or task?

                On top of this, I felt that I did well in scaffolding students to arrive at correct observations and answers during the task.  After stating the lesson objective and outlining the procedures of the task, I took in “I Do It” approach, in which I asked students to find the picture of a sweater in their bag.  I said the name of the object twice slowly to the group, and ask them to identify what s-blend the name of the object began with.  Rather than giving students complete independence in doing the task, I modeled how to discover the s-blend by “stretching” the word.  Additionally, if students had a question about a picture or word, rather than giving them the answer right away, I provided them with a hint or clue to push them towards the right answers.  Although I scaffolded students in these ways throughout the lesson, I felt as though I was using some of the same prompts over and over again.  What are some ways to differentiate prompts in scaffolding?  What are some different techniques that allow students to discover consonant blends both with support and on their own?