Day 3 :: First lesson

I took a small group of six kids for spelling. Every day the year 4s have spelling from 10:30-11am. The group had just finished the unit they were working on and thus we were revising. I had two games prepared and gave myself some time in the middle do go over the rules for the spelling convention they had been studying; how to make plurals for words ending in y.

We were sitting on a big rug of the world at the back of the classroom. I had made up a pile of flashcards with tthe words written on them, shown each to the students who read them out collectively before placing each on the mat in the middle of the circle. The I explained the rules of the game - karuta, a Japanese game - and made sure everyone understood the aim was to slap the word called out as fast as possible, and then spell it whilst the word was still covered. If they hit the wrong word they had to sit the next turn out ensuring the words were read properly.

The students were noisier than I expected and I was a bit worried they were disturbing the rest of the class, but generally they played the game well and it was good to see them thinking and trying hard to get the spellings right. I was intending to play a series of rounds, but it took longer than I expected and after the first round I reviewed the spelling rule again and moved on. I also think that if we had played a second or third round I would have lost the engagement factor.

Then I gave the students a word search and let them choose whether they worked individually or in pairs. One student yelled out really loudly when he had found the first word so I asked them to tell me when they had found all twenty, trying to reduce the impact on the rest of the class. They worked really well and didn't get distracted. I think it was an effecting first lesson.