10.28.2010 Reflection

Today was the third day of my field notebook lesson and the first literacy extension that I did with them on the parts of speech.  I reviewed the parts of speech with them and then reviewed some student sentences that I wrote on the whiteboard and analyzed the parts of speech with the class.  We specifically looked for descriptive words, but there were not any.  So as a group I asked the students if they could give me either some adjectives or adverbs that would give the sentence some more description.  They raised their hands to give me some descriptive words.  I rewrote the sentence on the board with the added words and then compared the new sentence to the old one.  We did this a couple of times before I had the students work silently on adding some descriptive words to 5 of the sentences that they had written in their notebooks.  While the students were rewriting, I walked around and checked their sentences and answered questions that they had.  My intro with the parts of speech was about 20 minutes, so the students had about 15 minutes to rewrite, which after the lesson was over, Mrs. K. informed me was a little bit too long of a period to let them write 5 sentences for because some of the students finished earlier that the others and I was so involved in checking work and answering questions that I didn’t notice that some of the students were just sitting there.  Next time I will be more conscious of giving the quicker students something to do other than just sitting there while other are still finishing. 

After the writing segment, I asked a couple of the students to give me an example of a one of their original sentences and then their new more descriptive sentence.  I wrote these on the board and discussed them with the class.  Then I asked the students to hand their written work in to me so that I could check it over.  I scheduled to come in class the next time and work with some of the students who still needed help with their sentences in the morning and then come in the afternoon to work on their maps.