Reflection for the week of October 16th - 20th

This week KJ and myself are preparing to teach our peer-to-peer lesson on Wednesday and Thursday. We found a book about map keys, and we plan on doing guided reading with a creative element on the end of each lesson. We are also video recording this lesson which has its own complexities.

KJ and I decided to merge our lessons so that we could have a more in-depth and well-rounded lesson set. We decided that KJ would teach the first lesson and I would piggy back the following day and close out the lesson. The book was short but had a great deal of information, that covered places including a zoo, museum, state park and aquarium. KJ covered plurals using “s” - “es” - “ies” and I covered compound words like waterfall and boathouse. These were used in the book and allowed for us to have a connected lesson set but cover different items so that we did not lose the students attention. The lessons creative elements were also merged to make our lesson more connected and seamless. KJ was to have her students create a map with a map key and then my group was going to take the map and make it into a game board and the map key was going to guide the question you would get asked for landing on certain spots.

the original map / game board layout and potential symbols for the map key

 The original plan was to teach our lesson on Wednesday and Thursday that way we could have the weekend to reflect on our lesson and complete our MAP forms. This plan was changed when we were told that we must evaluate the students in our group so that we know what reading level that they are. We explained that the teacher already tested our students. We were then told that we had to evaluate our students using the DRA kit and have evidence of our students reading level before we could teach them our lesson.

On Thursday we had to test our students so that next week we could teach our lesson and have time to reflect and turn everything in before our Professor observed lessons on the week of October 30^th. This was not optimal but KJ took two students and I took the other two and we used our whole class time to evaluate our group. It was not optimal but it was required so we got it done. When the testing was done we noticed that all our students were exactly where our cooperating teacher said they were.  It was a busy week but we are now ready to teach next week unless something comes up between now and then.