Retelling - ELA Lesson Plans #19

I don't know about you, but I am definitely glad Chinese New Year lasts for 15 days! Even though I'm a little late getting it on my lesson plans we always have an amazing time learning a little about the Chinese culture.  We will celebrate on Tuesday by taking key details from the text to put together a Dragon Parade.  The kids always have a ton of fun and they love learning about the holiday and culture.  We'll also take a look at Run Away Rice Cake in order to recount the plot and lesson.

During the week we will have eggs in an incubator that we will be journaling about. You'll see more of my lessons next week.

This week during writing we will be writing an autobiography.  I'll use Ruby Bridges as a mentor text and modeling with. my autobiography.  The students really connect with Ruby and it's a great way to learn about another influential American.

Click below for a free Chinese New Year graphic organizer.

To find my Chinese New Year lesson materials click the picture below.

Asking and Answering Questions - ELA Lesson Plans #18

We have a lot going on this week and not a moment to waste! It's pretty amazing that the kids are self sufficient enough to work on projects in small groups together.  We will continue learning about influential African Americans this week through a shared reading project.  If you missed it last week, our independent workstations focused on  Bessie Coleman and Mary Bethune Cookman.  Each day I will model the day's objective using a mentor text about Rosa Parks.  After my short model, students are broken up into groups and assigned to a text about an influential African American.  Each day they will work through the book gaining new information, using reading strategies previously learned in order to put together a poster that they will share with the class on Friday.  Any groups that finish early may present to the class on Thursday in order to save time.  Our writing block will be used in order to edit last week's task performance and we will use extra time for Valentine's read aloud every day.  We will also be finishing our social studies unit on maps by taking part in a big

Arctic Animals - ELA Lesson Plans #13

It's that time of year again.  You know the time where you have a ton on your plate, the kid's lose their minds and all your interim assessments come due.  Yet we still want to make everything in class as magical as possible.  It's because of all of those facts that I make my lessons as engaging, simple and short as possible.  My lessons will be 20 minutes to hold student's attention.  My text will be available in my classroom library or print and teach because I need to keep extra work to a minimum.    Below you will find my December calendar.  Can you believe I've planned a month out?

Each day this week we will be learning about a new arctic animal. I'll have differentiated text for the students and a graphic organizer.  You can see them in the picture below. On Friday students will get to chose an animal of their choice to research and make a poster about.  They'll have a graphic organizer to help guide them when creating the poster. Each lesson is short, meaningful and engaging.  Click on the picture below if you want to see the resource that I'm using.

 

Writing is getting serious. Students have come a long way since the beginning of the year.  Now it's time for some of the students to learn how to structure a paragraph.  We will extend our reading into writing where students will write about an arctic animal of their choice.  We'll make book covers to put the writing in.  I'm using a fabulous resource by More Time 2 Teach.

Each day my students who don't lose Dojo points will get to make a page marker like the ones shown below.  Most of the easier ones take under 10 minutes to create. The first couple of days we will start with simple plain ones.  The students will be able to sell their page markers at our classroom market day with classroom currency.  It's a great way to tie in behavior and social studies.  The how to video came from Red Ted Art on Youtube.  You can link to her account by clicking on the link in my Instagram post.

My lesson plan templates can be found at TPT by A Modern Teacher.

Surviving Formal Observations

Everyone in public teaching knows what it's like preparing for a formal observation.  Very few teachers look forward to the hoops that they have to jump through for the process.  If you read my post on Failing Teachers you will know exactly how I feel about my current evaluation system.  

Evaluation rubrics are different among different districts and states.  Our rubric claims to follow the Danielson model.  Below you will find the 8 page rubric that we are evaluated on for a formal observation.  In my district, PK-highschool teachers have the same rubric.  I currently teach ELA for 2nd grade.  

Let me start by saying that I am in no way a lesson plan or observation guru.  I usually score pretty well, but I am human and trying to make my way through the process just like everyone else.  My hope is to help another teacher out the same way teachers have helped me.  Just maybe, you will find my notes and materials helpful.

When preparing for formal observations we must first choose a lesson topic to teach.  We are encouraged to follow our district calendar unless we can provide data that shows our students are in need of another lesson first.  Once I choose my lesson topic I use a backwards design to form a lesson plan.  For this lesson, my students took a benchmark test that showed the majority needed more work with main topic of individual paragraphs.  Below you will find my lesson plan.  The lesson ended up lasting 1 hour and we did not complete the independent work.

When planning the lesson, there are a few points that I focus on more than others.

1.  Differentiation - I want all of my students to feel successful when they are learning.  I do this by differentiating my materials.  In this lesson I have differentiated text and task cards.
2.  Questioning -  If we teach the students to ask questions throughout their learning, they will be able to guide their own learning without us.  It's important to provide them with a lot of opportunity to practice questioning during the lesson.
3. Discussion - Just like questioning, students need to be able to have conversations with each other that helps them to learn.  We as teachers can't be with every student, every minute.  We can however teach them to work together to extend their learning.
4.  Engagement- The kids need to love what you are teaching them.  The text has to be engaging and hold their attention.

Of course life happened during my lesson and we had some hiccups.  The largest issue was that during our winter break, the students forgot what a paragraph was.  If I were doing it again, I would either review what makes a paragraph first, have the students number the paragraphs or cut the passages and have them work on one section at a time.  Partner work could have gone better, but we have to work with what we have.  A couple of friends were less than helpful and I heard a lot of "I don't know".  This happens when we have visitors in the classroom.  I improvised the lesson, pulled the class together during independent work and had a class conversation.  I wanted the class to demonstrate that they 1.  Understood the essential question.  2.  Could answer the essential question.  3.  Could provide examples from their text.  I purposefully called on the students who kept saying "I don't know what to do".  Each student was able to demonstrate what I needed them to.  When things start to fall apart, we have to be flexible and demonstrate that the students understand.  We can't just say they do.  I felt much better after a good portion of the class was able to regroup and show their knowledge of the standard.  I was also concerned that the students were not giving their partners the right grade from their rubric.  I had them revisit the rubric and regrade themselves.  This showed that the students were able to self-assess accurately and that I was aware of what was happening with the class.

Above you have read and seen my notes for the lesson as well as the lesson plan.  I put together a free file with my anchor charts and differentiated task cards for you to look at.  You can find that by clicking here.  I hope that you have found something here that you can take back to your classroom.  I would love to hear what you think, so please leave a comment below.