Living out our purpose is our calling. I had the opportunity to do so throughout my senior fall semester in a first grade, Title I, classroom. This field experience assisted me in especially understanding Component 1E, that I wrote about in the spring of my freshman year. Component 1E*, to reiterate, "..challenges students and teachers to understand state required content at a deeper level and build upon the skills previously acquired. Component 1E is necessary because it requires educators to think deeper to make more challenging lessons in order to make students think deeper, and even aid in grouping students together to help each other; this not only aids in mastery learning, but also helps make students leaders."
My placement for this experience was at Grove City Area School District's Highlands Elementary School in Mrs. Hartzel's first grade classroom. For the first part of the afternoon session, Mrs. Boyd, a reading specialist, comes in daily and assists students in a Title I labeled class. A Title I classroom is defined as "...a federally funded program for school districts that is designed to improve academic achievement of disadvantaged students." (Lexia, 2019) During my time here I mostly assisted students in a station styled practice in writing their letters out on a white board. For one of these seven weeks, I was given the opportunity to apply the knowledge I had been receiving in my Primary Literature class and the observations I have been making about the students in the classroom. I created a lesson on matching capital and lowercase letters, seen in the slideshow below. In order to grasp students' attention and to create a mission or story-line, I always like to throw a fun theme over the lesson, this lesson was Frozen themed, where the mission was to help Olaf survive the fall weather by building his personal flurry. This mission not only engaged the students that loved Disney's Frozen, but children who also just love a mission, as I found this the case with a couple of the boys and girls.
The students would build his "personal flurry" by matching a capital and a lowercase letter that were glued onto snowflakes, all images were found on Google Images Licensed for Reuse. Feel free to take a deeper look at my modified lesson plan and materials in the file below and send me an email if you end up utilizing this lesson in your classroom, I would love to hear your feedback! The only steps you would need to take is cutting out the letters and snowflakes, then gluing the letters to the snowflakes. If you want to reuse these year after year, lamination would follow, to keep them pristine. Before the lesson, I also matched each letter and took four or five pairs and put them into a little bag, so that way the students were only working with eight-ten letters at a time. You must also be careful of which letters you group together. I did not put p, d, or b into the same group or m and w. Putting those letters in the same group could cause the students to be even more confused.
So, you may now be asking yourself, "How does Component 1E fit into this field experience?" This Component was best fit for this experience, because it not only challenged the students of this Title I classroom, but it also challenged me! I am a Middle Level Education major, certified in Science, Social Studies, and English Language Arts- NOT Elementary Education. I spent a whole semester preparing for and growing from these field experiences outside of my areas of comfort. This made me build on my previous knowledge of Upper and Adolescent Literacy, and continued to grow my passion for English Language Arts education. This lesson challenged the students by having them work mostly on their own, with teacher supervision, but letting them work at their own pace. By using stations I was exemplifying Component 1E's style of learning activities and instructional groups. For my instructional groups, I attempted to place one accelerated student, one on track student, and one student that would need more help in each group. As you can see in the pictures, I would generally sit in between the latter two.
My placement for this experience was at Grove City Area School District's Highlands Elementary School in Mrs. Hartzel's first grade classroom. For the first part of the afternoon session, Mrs. Boyd, a reading specialist, comes in daily and assists students in a Title I labeled class. A Title I classroom is defined as "...a federally funded program for school districts that is designed to improve academic achievement of disadvantaged students." (Lexia, 2019) During my time here I mostly assisted students in a station styled practice in writing their letters out on a white board. For one of these seven weeks, I was given the opportunity to apply the knowledge I had been receiving in my Primary Literature class and the observations I have been making about the students in the classroom. I created a lesson on matching capital and lowercase letters, seen in the slideshow below. In order to grasp students' attention and to create a mission or story-line, I always like to throw a fun theme over the lesson, this lesson was Frozen themed, where the mission was to help Olaf survive the fall weather by building his personal flurry. This mission not only engaged the students that loved Disney's Frozen, but children who also just love a mission, as I found this the case with a couple of the boys and girls.
The students would build his "personal flurry" by matching a capital and a lowercase letter that were glued onto snowflakes, all images were found on Google Images Licensed for Reuse. Feel free to take a deeper look at my modified lesson plan and materials in the file below and send me an email if you end up utilizing this lesson in your classroom, I would love to hear your feedback! The only steps you would need to take is cutting out the letters and snowflakes, then gluing the letters to the snowflakes. If you want to reuse these year after year, lamination would follow, to keep them pristine. Before the lesson, I also matched each letter and took four or five pairs and put them into a little bag, so that way the students were only working with eight-ten letters at a time. You must also be careful of which letters you group together. I did not put p, d, or b into the same group or m and w. Putting those letters in the same group could cause the students to be even more confused.
So, you may now be asking yourself, "How does Component 1E fit into this field experience?" This Component was best fit for this experience, because it not only challenged the students of this Title I classroom, but it also challenged me! I am a Middle Level Education major, certified in Science, Social Studies, and English Language Arts- NOT Elementary Education. I spent a whole semester preparing for and growing from these field experiences outside of my areas of comfort. This made me build on my previous knowledge of Upper and Adolescent Literacy, and continued to grow my passion for English Language Arts education. This lesson challenged the students by having them work mostly on their own, with teacher supervision, but letting them work at their own pace. By using stations I was exemplifying Component 1E's style of learning activities and instructional groups. For my instructional groups, I attempted to place one accelerated student, one on track student, and one student that would need more help in each group. As you can see in the pictures, I would generally sit in between the latter two.
mod_lesson_pl.docx | |
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File Type: | docx |
*All answers are based on: Danielson, C. (2007). Enhancing professional practice a framework for teaching (2nd ed.). Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.