Mary Margaret ONeal Task 4 Textbox 4.0: Contextual Factors In my 2nd grade classroom, there are twenty-three students.

I teach every subject area: Reading, Math, Science, Social Studies, and Writing. I have three students who need to wear glasses to see the board. I also have four students who are English Second Language students and two of those students receive speech assistance twice a week. I have a student who is in the special education class but is in our class for socialization. Another student attends the special education class for reading help. In addition, another student attends extended resource three times a week. The students who need assistance create challenges during instructional time. Instructions have to be repeated multiple times for each group and four students have to have their test read to them to meet their IEP needs. To meet these needs, I have the students repeat the information back to me so that I know they understand the information. After whole group teaching or instruction, I make my way around the room giving assistance to each group. This allows for one on one attention that many students need to get the most of their learning experience. Two of my students that attend the special education class both have problem socializing with other around them. This affects the classroom because their behavior is handled separately. A handful of my students come from homes where their parents have to work late so the students are staying with relatives most of the time. This affects the students behavior in the classroom. This causes disruptions for the other students in the classroom. After school activities are in full swing this time of the year so that has an effect on many of my students. Many days, students come in worn out and tired because of the activities they had the day before that wore them out. This creates a potential problem if I do not get the students up and moving to help keep them away. Allowing my students to change positions, from the carpet to their seats, helps keep them going and awake. I also try to incorporate many handson activities for the students to interact with so that they are up and moving and interacting with one another. Textbox 4.1.1 The standard for this lesson is: CCSS RL 2.10: By the end of the year, read and comprehend literature, including stories and poetry, in the grades 2-3 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range. This standard is appropriate for this lesson because it provides an overall goal that the students need to meet at the end of the year. This Common Core Standard states that the students need to learn how to comprehend information and poems that they have read. Having lessons where they students write their own poems and identify different factors in the poems allows the students to better understand other information that they read. In this lesson, the students create their own poem with a specific

type of mood but they also have to comprehend the poems that other students wrote. They then had to match a mood to that poem. Therefore, the student had to comprehend the poem to be able to match an appropriate mood with that poem. This also meets the learning needs of the student by making the student think about what they are presented with and match the information to previous knowledge. This is a useful act that the students will need to use on a regular basis in life. The prior knowledge of this lesson effected my planning because I knew that I did not have to teach how to write a main idea poem. We had already covered the basics of writing a poem so the students just needed a small review which was covered throughout the lesson. The background information of this lesson, moods and main idea poems, influenced my lesson planning by prompting me to review different types of moods and pointing out a main idea poem that we had written earlier in the week. Textbox 4.1.2 To help the students engage in critical thinking and content area language, I would provide the students with objectives to accomplish and provide them with feedback. This would take place while the students are talking with their partners as well as while there are working independently on their own poems. While the students are working in their partnerships, I would work the carpet asking different groups questions to get them thinking about what they should be working on. Students will be able to dig deeper in their conversations with one another. While the students are working on their own, I would provide the students will different questions that they might come across while writing. To help the students engage in inquiring about their writing, I would ask the students different questions and help them organize their thoughts with one of our pre-writing techniques. This will allow the students to more thoroughly think about their main idea and the information they want to put in their poem. For this lesson, students were not given the chance to use other resources for their poem. Students are encouraged to be creative to come up with their own poems from past experiences instead of working with information from other resources. These instructional strategies will help the students to think deeper about the information they are wanting. This allows the students to think about the questions they are being asked. Students always need objectives of what they are supposed to do or accomplish. This allows them to be successful with their work. Textbox 4.1.3 The activity that is the main focus of this lesson is having the students create their own poem. The students have already been working with main idea poems, so they will work off of that previous knowledge. The students will then take their main idea poem and add a mood to the poem. This will expand their knowledge on what we worked on in the lesson. This meets the students? needs by expanding on previous knowledge and requires them to use their imagination to grow their ideas. This activity is designed to have the students take the information and examples we learned as a whole group, and use it as a guide for their own work. Throughout this activity, I would talk around and monitor the students while they

worked. Asking probing questions about the poem and the picture they are trying to draw with their words will help the students complete the activity successfully. The students can practice reading their poems to the teacher so that if they are sharing the poem, they will already have the mood of the poem decided. If I notice students are having issues with this concept, I would pull the students to work on what the lesson was about. Working with the students in smaller groups will allow them to grasp the concept as ask questions that they may have. This will also guide my lesson plans for future lessons. It will give me an idea of what information should be stressed and will give more ideas on how to present lessons in the future. The student work that I chose is a student who had a grasp of the concept and easily completed the assignment. The poem this student wrote included a main theme and context clues to what the mood of the poem was without telling how they felt about the topic. The students also incorporated previously learned features that are included in poems. The other student work that was chosen was a poem that was a main idea poem that included text features as well as previous learned poem features. This student, however, tells more information about the main idea rather than giving hints of information to add to the mood of the poem. Overall, the students made a great effort at completing their poems with a matching mood. Textbox 4.2.1 Within this lesson, many words that have been taught to go along with poetry were used to relate information to previous knowledge. This helps the student better understand what they are being taught. At the beginning of the video, you can see how the new information is related to previous lessons and how the content area language is used. Throughout the lesson, I implemented different types of instructional strategies. One strategy I used was allowing the students to talk through with their partners the information that we had just talked about. I also asked questions for the students to answer in their partnerships. While in their partnerships, I also worked my way through the students and asked different questions to get the students to think further with the partners. This engaged the student in critical thinking. You can see can example of this in the video at 6:25. Using engagement with the partnerships allows the students to work together to make them think about the questions they are given. The students have to work through their problems to come up with a solution. The students were allows to do this on the floor in their partnerships. At 10:30, the students are able to actively engage with their partnerships and this lesson to create a poem using a certain mood about a main idea. Reading was implemented in this lesson by allowing the students to read along with a poem on the SMARTboard. The students were also given the option to read their poems to the class. To incorporate more reading into the lesson, I could have had the students read more poems together to show the different moods that poems could have. Look to 4:25 to see how the students have to read the poem on the board to be able to answer the questions that were asked about it. Textbox 4.2.2

Throughout the lesson, the students were monitored to ensure that they were on task and working diligently. Anecdotal notes were taken while the students worked. These notes were used to further instruction when needed and also gave me an idea of what information needed to be reviewed before the next lesson. While the students were talking with their partnerships, I walked around to ask different questions to guide the students discussions. This also helped the students think more about the topic. This also helped the students focus their conversations on the questions that were asked and not about other random ideas. The feedback that was provided for the students allowed them to stay on task. While working on writing their own poems, I was able to provide feedback for students individually and asked different probing questions that allowed them to think for themselves on how they could improve their work. This part of the lesson did not fit in the allowable video time limit. Providing the students with constant feedback and communication is important for students to complete a lesson successfully. The students need to know when they are not doing something correctly so they can fix the mistakes before they learn the information the incorrect way. I provided feedback to the students by asking questions and telling the students to look over their poem again if it was not correct. Nonverbal communications used in this lesson were the example poems the students could use to help remind them of what we talked about during our carpet lesson time. These different types of communication with the students allowed them to be successful with completing their work. This part of the lesson did not fit into the allowed video time limit. Textbox 4.2.3 In our classroom, the students have to follow a set of rules and understand that there are positive and negative consequences for their actions. Throughout the lesson, the students are redirected when they are not doing what they are supposed to be doing. They are also rewarded and praise for following directions and helping out their peers. This is done throughout the lesson. This is also used to help promote positive reinforcement. The students know that they can earn tickets which are drawn for a chance to have a trip to the treasure chest. When the students hear another student receiving a ticket or a piece of candy, the redirect their attention to what they are supposed to be doing. The students are manly wanting to be recognized for positive behavior. This part of our positive reinforcement plan was not caught on video for this lesson. Textbox 4.3.1 As a result of this lesson, the students were able to create a main idea poem that portrayed a certain mood. Two student works have been provided to show how they completed the activity. The first work sample shows the student understood the directions of this lesson. This student wrote a poem that included an idea of how you are supposed to read the poem as well as an incorporation of different poem techniques that were learned in previous lessons. Student 1 demonstrated a complete understanding of this subject matter. Student 2 completed a main idea poem and told the reader how they felt about the topic. This was similar to what they were supposed to do but they were told not to give away the mood of the poem. The reader needs

to be able to figure out what the mood of the poem is by the expressions used without directly saying how the writer felt. After conferencing with this student, they better understood that they need to add expression into their poems and not give away the surprise of figuring out the mood. Textbox 4.4.1 Overall, the students did a wonderful job with this lesson and reached the learning goal of creating a poem with an underlying mood. The students who did not understand this lesson were able to ask questions and revise their work again to correct their mistakes. The percentage of the class achieving the learning goal was about 75%. There were a few students who had to leave in the middle of the lesson because of resource classes. These students had to complete their writing later on. The lesson was reviewed with the students so that they would understand what they missed. In the future, I would make sure to continue circulating the room and working with the students in small groups or individually while they are working on their independent work. This allows for more personal time with the students and provides me with more insight on what each student might be struggling with. I would make sure to include everyone in the whole group instructional time and allow the students to repeat back the directions of our independent activity. As for classroom management, I would remember to stay positive with my class and to point out what the students are doing correctly. The students enjoying being praise and strive to make the teacher happy. This reflects on the rest of the class. I would also make sure those students, who I send back to their seat because they are causing disruptions, to the same standard as the rest of the students. If I could teach this lesson again, I would provide more reading materials for the students to use during our instructional time. These reading materials can be used as examples for the students to refer to while they are working on their own poems. I think that extra reading time is always a positive for the students. They need to immerse themselves into books which will expand their thoughts and ideas. After the lesson was completed and I saw that there were still a couple of students who were struggling with the idea of an underlying mood, I think more examples from different reading sources would have given the students different examples to refer to during their independent writing time. These are only slight revision that I would make to this lesson so that this lesson could be even more effective.