It's a Monday night, but really it's a lot like a Sunday today. The most important thing for me to get done is to go back over my "rough lesson outline for the week" that I made at the end of last week and find out how these plans fit for the first couple of days for the upcoming week. For myself, I try to plan a "rough idea of the week" and as the week goes on I tweak these lessons constantly to fit the needs of the student, to fit the needs of the classroom and try to see where the students take my "plan".
As I do this tonight, I am reflecting back on the lesson that I had the most success with last week. It was interesting because as I looked at my lesson the night before I thought to myself "those students are going to eat that thing alive, it's not deep enough and doesn't offer the students any opportunity to take on their own learning". In my classroom, what I mean by getting eaten alive is that my class will be in a moment of chaos. These students see through weak lessons and lessons that don't challenge them, and they do it like clockwork. Due to this, I knew I needed to make some changes and I was able to come up with what I thought was a great lesson while still achieving the same goal.
My goal for the lesson was to introduce habitats and how they fit into a community for a book we were going to read for the day. As this lesson was being introduced it started slow, and I could feel the tension in the room grow. The students didn't want any part of it. I was hoping, hoping I could grab their attention and grab it soon, before I lost the chance for what I thought was a great lesson. As I tried to regain their attention I had to introduce 3 key words (habitat, architect and interior) but I knew I had to do it quickly. Luckily for me I had a little help, and soon the classroom energy reached the level of interest and curiosity, the students were essentially engaged. After introducing the vocabulary, we now went on a quick walk through the school to look at what an architect had done to our habitat (our school) and also what he or she had done to the interior of our habitat.
We discovered some key characteristics and then took some pictures of the architectural features. We came back and discussed why the architect may have done this and also briefly talked about what we would do if we were the architect of our own habitat. We then looked at some blueprints and got to work on our assignment which was being our own "architect", creating an "interior" blueprint of our "habitat". After this we were able to introduce the book we were working on.
Why am I sharing this brief story with you? It's important for me to look back because I feel as though out of my 15-20 lessons last week this was by far my strongest. Some of my lessons were complete flops and others were just OK. Being OK and having flops for the students is not an option. So as I plan my rough draft and then look back nightly, I strive, like most educators to create that strong lesson that each and every student can become immersed in. This week my goal is to try to get 2 or 3 of those deep lessons and keep building on that weekly as I really get to know my students.
Keep Learning, Never Give Up, Be A Kids Role Model
