After looking over the evaluation notes my CT made on yesterday's lesson, it was clear to me that some changes needed to be made regarding how the concept was introduced and the level of interaction students need to exhibit in order for maximum learning to take place. This time around it was good to see some more student participation in the mini-lesson before they returned to their seats for the You Do portion of the lesson. Two students who normally stay quiet in the back on the gathering area were able to take the pointer that I brought and with a smile on their faces, showed everyone correctly where to put apostrophes in the sentence example to show a possessive noun. Since I was only given about 22 minutes to teach a 45 minute lesson, we naturally got to about half of what I had planned. That's the life of a teacher and my CT's said it was okay because we could revisit the concepts later with commas used in series.
Some strengths of the lesson included the fact that everyone seemed more engaged when we were working with the central whiteboard in the room as opposed to listening to someone talk excitedly about what is on a PowerPoint presentation (yesterday's connected lesson). If we had more time next time, I would definitely have done more fun activities to introduce apostrophe's such as "Elephant in the Room" or maybe could do something kinesthetic like contraction combining where students must look for other students with parts of a contraction (3 total to make a contraction team). Each new team that forms will give praise to their team members and then break off to find new partners.
Things to improve for next time include having enough time to form a clear understanding of both concepts in the lesson. I feel like we really were able to cover possessive nouns, and could have spent some more time on contractions. Giving students specific worksheets on only possessive nouns might have been the better route, yet I feel like since the cooperative learning piece was only Timed-Pair-Share there needed to be more of it, especially with the lack of cooperative learning in the independent practice on commas. For the sake of clarity, next time I will ask students to bring a personal whiteboard to the carpet, and we'll go over contractions as a whole class before being asked to make evaluative claims about contractions used in sentences for practice. Overall, I think the lesson went well and it was really great to see those gentlemen who don't usually participate show the class their knowledge with pride.
Some strengths of the lesson included the fact that everyone seemed more engaged when we were working with the central whiteboard in the room as opposed to listening to someone talk excitedly about what is on a PowerPoint presentation (yesterday's connected lesson). If we had more time next time, I would definitely have done more fun activities to introduce apostrophe's such as "Elephant in the Room" or maybe could do something kinesthetic like contraction combining where students must look for other students with parts of a contraction (3 total to make a contraction team). Each new team that forms will give praise to their team members and then break off to find new partners.
Things to improve for next time include having enough time to form a clear understanding of both concepts in the lesson. I feel like we really were able to cover possessive nouns, and could have spent some more time on contractions. Giving students specific worksheets on only possessive nouns might have been the better route, yet I feel like since the cooperative learning piece was only Timed-Pair-Share there needed to be more of it, especially with the lack of cooperative learning in the independent practice on commas. For the sake of clarity, next time I will ask students to bring a personal whiteboard to the carpet, and we'll go over contractions as a whole class before being asked to make evaluative claims about contractions used in sentences for practice. Overall, I think the lesson went well and it was really great to see those gentlemen who don't usually participate show the class their knowledge with pride.