29th April, 2015.

Continue to work on your pronunciation and learn to pronounce new vocabulary before
reading stories to children as poor pronunciation made the story very difficult to follow as
you read. Encourage student engagement in class. One student asked could I read it for
you? and you said No! Be gentler with the students. Summary writing has not been
taught so students were not able to successfully complete todays small group activity of
writing a summary. The task was also not sufficiently differentiated to cater to all
students learning needs. Continue to work on using a variety of classroom management
strategies so that you can better address the range of behaviors that need correcting
(snapping your fingers isnt classroom management!). Work too on ensuring that your
blackboard summary is neat and models acceptable and requisite student behavior such as
underlining of headings etc. The list of vocabulary words, the main characters of the
story, and their importance should have been more strongly highlighted (or developed
with students) so as to indicate their relevance within the story and hence the need to
incorporate these within the summary. Be very clear before you begin planning what you
want your outcomes to be and plan tasks to match the amount of time that you have.
Wrap up needs to be stronger and better indicate main points of lesson. At the end a child
says I learnt nothing, this is a harsh statement and I am sure was very difficult to hear.
We have discussed that you should journal about this statement and I look forward to
reading that.
06th May, 2015.
A vast improvement over the last lesson. The learning objectives (which were clearly
written on the board) were read out to students after asking them about what they had for
lunch and helped teacher to bond with students. Students were asked if a book they had
read was a play script or a narrative and asked to justify their answers (good practice!).
students were then taken through the features of a narrative story too so that they ended
up comparing narratives with play scripts (good practice!). The teacher taught theory
such as left stage, right stage etc. and could have presented a visual to enhance her
talk shop about these things. Students were then asked to put labels on areas to identify
stage directions which was good but they should have been asked to justify their choices.

A nice game followed to ratify the theory and was called the stage direction game which
contained instructions such as jump to left stage. The teacher then taught the use of the
colon and brackets in playscripts. The teacher then put up a playscript on the board for
students to investigate and discuss the stage directions etc. that had been taught today
contained within the script (good practice!). Unfortunately, it was too small for anyone
not standing directly in front of the board to see. Multimedia or just a regular large poster
hand stenciled onto bristol board could have helped all students to benefit from this
worthwhile activity. Because students were unclear from this point as they did not have
chance to solidify their understandings many were not able to successfully complete the
individual activity that was set later as a task. Students who finished the set task early
were encouraged to help their peers (good practice!) but as more students completed the
class eventually fell into disarray. Classroom management on the mat was very good and
students were attentive and excited during this time. Move to chairs and small group
work stations was a little noisy and disheveled as students were not told where they were
expected to sit before they left the carpet. The teacher used a clapping strategy to reassemble the class which was very effective (good strategy!). Students then presented
their work but there was no visual (e.g. OHP or ELMO) to help the rest of the class to
view students work. A gallery walk would have been given students opportunity to view
and comment on each others work. Good improvement overall.