Date: March 9, 2023
By: Shaylee Marr
Today was another amazing day at my field experience location. Per usual, the day began with the students coming into the classroom and completing their bellringer. This weeks’ bellringer asked the students how they believed people got sick. Many students did have a general idea of how people got sick and began their sentences with “People get sick from . . .” The exciting part was that most of the day, I seemed to lead the classroom. From the beginning of the day when the bellringer was presented until the end when the students left, I pretty much lead the class with lessons and instruction.
To begin with my day of instruction, I lead with the the literacy lesson. The students repeated the word after I said it and replaced certain letters as necessary to make new sounds. Next, I took the students to gym, where they played bowling with their groups. After retrieving them from the gym, we came back where the students from both my MT and another teacher’s classroom did word recognition. With this, the teacher places the words on the smartboard using slides and the students read them as the slide changes and continuously gets faster with each set of slides. After this, the students went to lunch. After returning from lunch, we began with the math lesson. The math lesson consisted of the students using word problems and breaking them down in order to complete the task.
Once the students were finished with their normally daily task from the curriculum, we began the social studies lesson I had planned. The social studies lesson was essentially a continuation and closure of the 3 day lessons I had planned and led the students in over the las few weeks. To begin, we talked about the sun, the moon, and the star. For the second lesson, we discussed the moon phase. Finally, for the social studies connection, we discussed Dr. Mae C. Jemison, the first African American woman in space. When I began the lesson, the students seemed excited to be doing something so different like learning about a real life astronaut such as Dr. Jemison. The students were also excited to sit on the carpet and listen to the read aloud activity about the biography of Dr. Jemison’s life. When reading the story to the students, they asked engaging questions and also answered comprehension questions during the read aloud. After the read aloud activity, I talked gave the students instructions about how to complete the works sheet. At the bottom of the work sheet, the students were given a set of expectations to follow such as completing their sentences with a punctuation mark, beginning the sentence with a capital letter, and ensuring the words were spaced out properly. After explaining these expectations to the students, they were each able to produce three sentences using facts that represent Mae Jemison’s life achievements and color the image of her at the top of the paper.
Overall, from this lesson, I feel that it was an amazing closure to this lesson. I enjoyed finding new and interesting ways to connect the lesson together using different content and subject area while also still making it interesting for the students. The students also seemed so amazed especially when they were able to see an authentic image of Dr. Jemison in real life to give them some idea of what she looked like and who she was within history. I feel that I did a good job with relaying the information to the students and ensuring they understood what was expected of them throughout the lesson. Next week, since I will be on spring break, I will not be uploading but look forward to an update the following week. See you all next time!
