Week Eleven of Student Teaching

This was a fabulous week of student teaching. We have started a unit on narratives. The student haven 't started writing them in earnest, but we did an exercise in voice and some pre-writing to get them all set to write. I also did a vocabulary review and we continued to read "For One More Day."

All of these lessons went well. Not extremely well, but well. The lesson in voice was a fun lesson for the classes that got involved. We used a page from Where's Waldo and they chose some characters on the page and then wrote what the student thought they were saying or thinking. No action no describing just talking and thinking. Then we would read them out loud so everyone could guess who they thought it was. CRTs are coming up in not too long so I am reviewing so that they can be up to speed on their root words. Finally we started some pre-writing for their narratives. I had them read a few examples of good narratives and we discussed what made them good. I would also condense the stories into about two sentences to demonstrate how borring the stories could be. Then we made some lists with themes. Like best times you've had with family and friends, embarrasing moments, painful moments, funny moments etc. Then I had them choose one that might make a good story. Finally we used a garphic organizer to analyze their moment, breaking it up into portions like motion, suspense, who was there etc. That is as far as we got.

These were all effective techniques that I plan on using in the future. The vocab review is something simple but it was a partner activity that could be done without taking up much time and be effective. I think maybe in the future I would like to do more than jsut recall, but alot of them couldn't jsut remember them so they had to figure them out by thinking of words that have the root in them. The voice exercise I will use again but I might find something different for classes which aren't very good at getting involved. The list making was by far the most effective and enjoyable exercise we did this week. I could tell just about everyone got involved and seemed to be enjoying themselves. It also prepared them for writing their stories. And finally I think the analyzing process is going to make it easier for them to organize their story and give them alot of options for making it interesting.