GLT Reflection

In this lesson, students worked on creating their own Halloween Concept Book. This is an adapted lesson to what was previously planned. My hope was that students would be able to come up with their own concept book ideas at this point but because most students still seem to struggle with the idea of a Concept book—my MT and I decided to provide the students with a prompt at this time. We hope to give them this experience so that students can, in the next week, come up with their own ideas. We started by reviewing the list of Halloween ideas that we previously came up with and exploring the mentor text, “My First Halloween”. We talked about the noticings in the book and students were able to identify that the book was all about one concept (Halloween) and each page had a different idea with corresponding text. I reinforced these ideas for the students’ own book. Most students understood the concept—they were able to apply their understandings to their own book. Students were asked to create a title page with a corresponding Halloween picture and three pages—each with a Halloween idea and a corresponding word. Some of the ideas students struggled with is having the same idea over again in the book (for instance, having “cat” on two pages in the book). Another misunderstanding from two students is having multiple ideas on one page—for instance, drawing and writing both a pumpkin and a cat, or a bat and candy on one page instead of separating them into two pages. While interpreting their work, it is important to take into consideration the table groups that the students are sitting in. To really see whether or not students understand the idea of a concept book and can come up with their own ideas (or take ideas off the class list), I need to see that students are not borrowing ideas from a peer and that the ideas in their book are theirs. Something that I learned about my students’ literacy practices is their resourcefulness. We previously discussed the use of word wall words, alphabet charts, color words and other text written around the classroom as a resource in a previous lesson and students used these resources to help them with their spelling without reminder. Another thing I noticed is that students are able to come up with letters that correspond with a sound if I help them sound it out but are unable to stretch out words themselves. I plan on re-teaching the material to students who need additional support during reading or read-alouds. If students are reading a concept book (which all students have at least one in their book bag) I can discuss these noticings and again highlight the main characteristics of a Concept Book. If I were to teach this lesson again, I would use different vocabulary in my teaching. It was not until half way through my lesson when I realized that I may be confusing the students by saying that the book had to be about one “big idea” and that each page is also about “one idea”. To me, this makes sense but to students it would seem confusing because they may not see the difference between a big idea and its supporting ideas. I could, perhaps, just use the term “concept”—and say that each book is about one concept while each page is an idea about that concept. I think using very separate and distinct vocabulary may clear up confusion so that students can better learn and focus on the lesson. Again, this lesson helped me to see the importance of exposing students to different genres and helping them differentiate books and text by its purpose.