Melanie BeanJournal Number Five

02 NovemberJournal Number Five

I really thought that my lesson went really well in the special education resource room. I

was really worried that the children would have a hard time with a guest observer in the

classroom and to my surprise they were on their best behavior. I feel that I was able to cover all

of the objectives and get the students to my desired outcome with my support. Since this is a

special education class that I am doing my pre-student teaching in we have some everyday

challenges that we worry about and during the lesson these did not occur.

The lesson was designed to be a week long lesson and be broken down into small

sections throughout the week. I was able to teach three of the days out of the week. All three

days the students did a wonderful job and really participated to the extent that I expected. The

goal was to work on rhyming words to increase their fluency in reading. It has been proven when

students are able to rhyme it helps with reading fluency and decoding skills. The students really

enjoyed the picture sorting cards that went along with the book I choose and also really loved the

poem that had hand movement to go along with the lessons. The students were able to see the

pictures instead of reading words which really helped with their sorting. They were working on

rhyming in this exercise that is why I choose pictures instead of words. Maybe in the future I

would use pictures and words on the cards. I really think this worked nicely with just the

pictures for this lesson. I also think it worked nicely as well because we worked in a group at

first and eventually at the end of the week they were assessed to see if they could complete the

sort on their own.

If I could change one thing about the lesson I think I would have modeled the sort that we did as

a group first. I would have demonstrated where each picture sorts went while talking through my steps

out loud. I would have also pointed out the rhyming words in the book that was read aloud on the first

day and not just on the last few days of the lesson. I think that it was a learning experience for not only

the children, but for me as well. At the end of the week either way I feel it was a success and the

children met my objectives. I will say that I was not expecting the lessons to go as quickly as they did.

Normally we have a problem with attention in the classroom, but during the lesson the children were all

paying attention and enjoying the lesson.

The assessment that I used for the lessons was that the end of the week the students were able

to glue their sorts to a piece of paper correctly. They were supposed to do this at 80% accuracy and they

did. I was very happy with this success. I will use this information for lesson in the future because I can

see which types of words they can rhyme successfully and move to more difficult ones for the future. I

also know that they enjoyed these activities that were implemented into the lesson and I could do

similar activities for the future. Overall I was happy with the success of the lesson and would only make

small changes for the future.