Writing lesson plan reflection and final thoughts

Lesson Topic: 

Writing a letter to our future teacher                                                                                              

Date Taught:  7/28/2015

What went well: 

Today I taught a lesson on writing a letter.  Many students did not know much about writing letter, and this was a skill we had not taught before during summer learning place.  Our students had previously read the book The Day the Crayons Quit during one of our other reading lessons.  So today, I just read a few letters as examples for the students.  The students really enjoy this book as it is funny, so this helped them stay engaged.  After reading the letters to the students, I asked questions to assess their prior knowledge about letters.  I was surprised to find that they did not know much about letters.  Only one student knew about greetings and closing in a letter.  Because of little prior knowledge, I modeled how to write a letter on the board.  The students wrote letters to their future teachers.  I wrote in two different colors on the board.  The students were to copy the green writing in their own letters and change the writing to their own personal thoughts and information.  Writing a letter together went better than I think it would have gone if I didn’t help them write the letter and have them copy it.

What did not go as planned:

The probing questions did not go as planned, because I assumed the students knew more than they did. 

How to change for subsequent lessons:

For future lessons, I want to look up how other teacher teach writing letters for the first time.  I think I would also give students a wider variety of letter examples.

Final Reflection on Summer Learning Place:

Summer learning place has been a great learning experience for me.  I was pleasantly surprised at how much I was able to teach my students in such a short amount of time.  I actually made my students goals too simple as they were able to learn a lot more than I expected.  I definitely learned a lot from co-teacher about cooperative learning activities.  However, I didn’t learn as many strategies for memory skills and retention as I would have liked.  I was a much more effective lesson planner than I thought I would be.  My co-teacher helped a lot with this skill as well.  I was originally nervous about teaching with someone else.  I am so glad that we were paired together, because I learned so much from my fellow classmate and teacher.