Discuss how your field experience teachers are helping students understand the concept of story and learn about story structure, genres, and comprehension strategies. In addition, teachers support students as they write retellings, innovations, and sequels and as they explore writing in a variety of genres. How does this happen in your field experience classroom? What would you add to this classroom from Tompkins & from the Girl with the Brown Crayon?
I find my Tuesday Experience teacher to be so great in her reading and writing expertise. She always finds such fun new ways to get the children's minds thinking and building their familiarity in writing stories. During my Tuesday Experience my teacher, Mrs. DiPietro, did a minilesson on what makes a great beginning of a story.
Mrs. DiPietro had created a power point for the children about the four main ways a writer could start a story. Those four ways included: question lead, action lead, taking lead and snap shot lead. She created the power point to really catch the students’ attention and engage them in the minilessons. When observing her lesson, I realized that every single students attention was focused on Mrs. DiPietro and the Smart Board. I found the children to ask a ton of question and answer many questions that were asked to them.
To make it easier for the students to follow along with the smart board, Mrs. DiPietro went step by step with the presentation. First, she introduced what the four ways to start a story were. Then, she went over each one individually. As she was reviewing each one individually, she took examples of beginnings of stories and modeled what each one was. I found this to be very effective because not only were the children engaged, but the children would also be able to mirror off the examples and put that into their own writing.
I find that my teacher is always doing some sort of writing lesson and really wants the children to focus on their ideas and how they can improve their writing. I find her ways fun and exciting and I can definitely say that I have even learned a lot from her lessons.
Has anyone else had experiences like mine? What kind of techniques will be used in your own classroom??
2 comments:
It sounds like Mrs. DiPietro is a really amazing teacher. All of her ideas are very creative. I wish I could have seen her power point. I also wish my Tuesday Experience had access to a Smart Board.
In my 5th grade Tuesday Experience classroom at Whiting Lane, I do not get to see a lot of writing. There was one writing lesson that Mr. Lucey did with his students that was really amazing. He took a plant and discussed with the students what it looked like. They came up with a variety of differnt objects or events that the plant might represent, with a little creativity. Then, the students picked one of those idea and wrote the beginning of a poem using that idea. I believe they continued working on the poesm the next week.
I do not get to see a lot of specific writing techniques, such as how to start, but the class does work on elaborating and describing all the time, as I just briefly explained.
I actually recentlyly taught a writing lesson to the entire class. Mr. Lucey helped me with the idea, and we discussed how to make it most effective. I took passages from "Charlotte's Web" and made them less descriptive. We then tried to add details as a class, trying to paint a picture in the readers mind. Then I took another passage, and had students write down some ideas on their own. They were then placed in small groups, where they discussed and combined their ideas and wrote out their new passages on large paper. We read them out loud to the class. It was interesting to see the students so engaged in the lesson. Their revised passages were so much better than I ever expected. I was please with the outcome. I know I did not give an elaborate description of the lesson, but do you think there is anything else that could be added to it to make the lesson even better?
I have not had that much experience with writing in my classroom. THe other day I did complete a mini lesson about witers block. The children were all very interested and they all came up with creative ideas that can be used when they have nothing to write about. We wrote down all the ideas on the smartboard and then the students wrote down what we had said in their journals. Also they were each allowed to state their favorite idea. I thought this would be helpful because the students are always asking what to write about and now they have a solution in front of them.
Has anyone else completed a mini lesson of their own? How did it go?
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