12.13.2010 Reflection

Today I did a lesson on writing with voice.  I used a lot of discussion and thinking for this lesson.  Finally putting Mrs. K’s technique into use.  It was awesome and the students had a lot of fun.  I did a quick introduction with the students on what voice was and used some examples of a cowboy or the big bad wolf from Little Red Riding Hood. 

My formula for this lesson was to give and example of how a specific character spoke or acted and then give the students some time to discuss amongst themselves what a cowboy, president, old person sounded like.  After the discussed with each other, they wrote for a couple minutes, pretending to be that character.  After writing, they shared their writing with their neighbor, and then I called on two students to share some of their writing. 

The students are still young enough that they still are engaging in dramatic play and when one of them was having trouble thinking of what to write I would talk to them about pretending during play and ask them if they ever pretended to be a cowboy or the president and then they got a good idea of what they were supposed to do after that. 

At the end of the lesson, we had about 20 minutes left and so I gave the students a choice of what they wanted to write about and they got to free write for 10 minutes.  Mrs. K. put on some thinking music.  At the end of 10 minutes, I had students come up to the front of the class to share what they had written.  It was very entertaining. 

To wrap things up I discussed with them what they learned from this exercise and they said that they learned that writing with another voice is like pretending and you feel like you are the person that you are writing like. 

I feel like this was a very successful lesson and I am glad that I had the opportunity to do this with the students.  Unlike the math and tornado lesson, as a teacher I felt like I accomplished something with the students, but maybe that is because I collected a written assessment, whereas with the other two lessons I assessed through oral dialogue or playing a game.  I feel like the field notebook lesson was really successful too and there was a lot of writing with that lesson.  I see a lot of cross curricular literacy instruction in my future.