#promptfour

Within the grade 4 classroom, the students participated in reciprocal reading. This was based on the topic that they were learning about within their inquiry lessons, showing how the lessons were intergraded to assist them with their inquiry studies. I liked the way the students had the opportunity to reflect at the end of the lesson and had one person from each group whom would share a question they had, something that they predicted or even something they found interesting.

a writing activity that the students engaged with that i taught was a creative writing activity where they had a choice to choose there own character, setting and object. The first lesson that this was taught flowed very nicely until some students had difficulty thinking about what to write with the components that they had to include. This caused some chaos within the classroom. However, this was a learning experience for me as i went home to think about how i could improve the lesson. This was where i did an example story on the board to show students their expectations and to give them some ideas of how to write the creative piece. Students then effectively completed there writing piece with confidence.

During my third year placement, there weren't that many opportunities for students to read and write but in saying that, I really enjoyed the reading aspects when they did do it as they were doing a book study on the book Wonder. Everyday they would spend 10 mins before lunch time reading and assessing through the book. I really could see that the students enjoyed reading this book and wanted to do more. my mentor asked me to create an activity for the grade 5 students in relation to the book. It was lots of fun as a came up with the idea to do pen-pals. this required the students to choose a character from the book and write to them, introducing themselves, and asking them questions that they would want answers if they were to meet this character in person. They loved it and wanted to share their letters with their peers. 

literacy can be hard or difficult to understand for any student, but when it comes to having a language barrier, that difficulty is amplified. Trying to teach literacy to 36 students whose first language is not English was quite a challenge. As they were in Week 4, the students were up to comprehension questions. Attempting to teach comprehension to 36 young minds who don’t speak English was one of the hardest tasks i have ever done. This became a ‘not so good’ literacy experience. I had given the students a comprehension worksheet fit for Grade 1-2, unfortunately this was new to them as they had never seen nor did they understand what comprehension was. Also having limited resources didn’t help the situation, I then made my own comprehension sheets and all 36 students tried their hardest to answer the questions. This placement was one I will never forget and cherish forever..

Third year placement: went out with a bang! Throughout the past two weeks, i survived grade 5, literacy and a cold. Whilst I taught 6 literacy lessons over the two weeks, we had a lot of other educational distractions arise including 3 excursions. When I was able to teach literacy I introduced to the students how to infer from a text and how to compare and contrast ideas. I also taught a couple of lessons on procedural writing; the students had to create a creative candy recipe - including the materials, equipments, ingredients and the steps of how to create it after they had completed a draft they had to revise it, edit it and then publish it. I liked the fact that the students had different tasks according to their literacy ability, this meant all of the students were 100% engaged with the task at hand and were able to answer their set comprehension questions with ease and without just sitting their not understanding the chosen reading. (The ability range for literacy started at an 10 years old - and went all the way up to an14year old) The class itself wasn't reading a book together however in each child's 'book box' which remained at the top of their tables they had to keep a minimum of 5 books and they had to be a mixture or fiction and non- fiction. When the students finished a task early and or every morning they would read until the teacher introduced the next lesson - these books were rotated weekly.