When I entered the class this morning, Mrs. K. was in the middle of a metacognitive lesson on cause and effect. She used the example of oversleeping with the students to get them to think about the why someone oversleeps and what can happen as a result. After this they read a book called Ferdinand the Bull but did a vocabulary lesson before hand to introduce terms that were specific to bull fighting. After the story she had the students create their own cause and effect charts about the story. Once again, I am noticing that most of the lesson was focused on the students thinking and not the material used to facilitate their thinking. I guess before observing in this classroom, I thought a lot about engaging activities and did not really pay much attention to thinking and talking except for at the beginning and end of the lesson plans that I wrote. I am definitely rethinking everything.
At the end of the lesson, Mrs. K. used a magic ball as a talking stick that she threw to group leaders so they could report on what their group had come up with as their cause and effects of the story. The magic ball was fun and interesting for the students. It made sharing their thinking maps a game.
After this lesson my child study subject and I went to the library together and I observed him as he picked out books and handled them for a Concepts of Print assessment. He knew how to pick out a book and that the orientation of the book was to turn the cover right side up and open the cover, read from left to right. He made print to speech match, read his sentences and stopped at the periods and knew the difference between lower and upper case letters, could recognize the first word in a sentence by the uppercase letter.
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