Day 9 :: Home stretch

My first lesson of the morning was a small group guided reading session. I had previously taught the higher level students and these guys were at the lowest standard of reading in the class. We made predictions about the book The Great Shopping Cart caper and then read through the story, with each students getting to read several times. I went over pronunciation and new words with them whilst the were reading and at the end covered comprehension issues. The I gave each student a chapter and they had to summarise it. I went around each students and made sure they understood the task and helped if need be. About this time I lost three of the students to a remedial spelling catch up class and finished the session with only two. With the other students gone however, they seemed to write their summaries much more quickly and we came back to together and shared their writing and then talked about some of the issues in the book. It was a nice session, possibly made much easier by only having two students for much of it.

Then I had the same top group of students for spelling and have no idea what went wrong here. Somehow I missed the engagement factor. We identified the silent consonants inthe vowels, finishing up fro the other day, but then I couldn't get some of the students to stop being silly. I'm not sure if it was me the activity or a combination of both. I need zing back. Exhaustion crippling!

I had planned to give them a word search after we had completed the activity in a circle, but they were getting positively boisterous by this time and I didn't want to reward them for being silly, so I gave them a writing exercise to do for the remaining time, with the threat that anyone not finished would be doing so at recess. Everyone miraculously worked very efficiently and we came back together and shared stories and poems.

I again made mistakes with expectations and engagement, but think I did a good mid-lesson correct.

In the afternoon we continued on with integrated studies and looked at the communication issues that would have faced the early settlers and the indigenous community. I spent a lot of time planning and scaffolding this lesson, because the problems that could beset it were multiplicitous, and the extra extra effort paid dividends. We played a simple form of charades as a whole group, and then I gave each small group a phrase they had to try and communicate to the rest of the class without words, sounds or props. Each individual student was given a role and then everyone was given five minutes to prepare. After which each group had a minute in which to communicate their message followed by time for small groups to decide what they thought the messages were. At the end we came back into a whole group, discussed what students thought were the messages and what they really were, and then moved into a short but effective discussion on the problems peoples of differing linguistic backgrounds have communicating with each other.

I was really really happy with this lesson. Finally things seemed to be falling into place.