Craft Reflection 1

During my lesson I was surprised at how well the two students participated. At every page they wanted to talk about what had happened and what was going on in the pictures. Since these two hardly every participate during read alouds I thought I was going to have to ask many questions to get them to state their predictions but this was not the case at all. The only problem with this was the students were suppose to be writing their predictions in their double entry journals, but because the conversations would go on for so long and so many things would be said, when I would say "Okay, now lets write that in your journal" they would have already forgotten what was said. At first this was a problem to me and I would recap everything that we had all just stated so they would know what to write in their journals, but this was not very fun for the students and they did not want to have to write their predictions down after we had already discussed them. I really liked the conversations we were having about the book and I didn't want them to stop but I also didn't know how to get them to have the good conversations while still writing in their journals as planned. Finally, after a few pages I suggested that instead of them both writing in their journal separately, I would write our ideas down while we were discussing them and we could go over them as a group. This was not what I had planned in my lesson at all but overall once the change was made I think everything went by really smoothly. Looking back I think it was a good thing that I was able to be flexible during the lesson. If I would have stuck with how I had originally planned the lesson I do not think the students would have gotten as much out of it as they did once the changes were made. Even though at first I was not comfortable straying from my plans, in the end it turned out to be a very good lesson not only for the students, but for me as well.