Kelsey Wheaton 1.

In the instruction seen in the clip(s), describe strategies you used to engage students in learning tasks to develop skills and strategies to comprehend or compose text. The lesson that I chose to submit for this assignment was the last day of a four day unit on the election. In the days leading up to this last lesson the students listened to two books about elections, made posters to show support for Duck and Farmer Brown, voted on their favorite kind of popcorn, and made posters to show their support for a particular class mascot. Throughout this lesson the students were listening to their campaign videos, giving mini speeches to their students, voting, and creating a bar graph to show the results of the election. One strategy that I thought was particularly engaging was that I video taped the students the day before with their posters and then I showed them to the students in my lesson. The students were super excited to watch themselves as well as their friends. Another strategy that I utilized that my students enjoyed was that they were able to actually cast their own vote in our ballot box. The students were very excited to use the ballot box and to hold our class mascot election. The students were also engaged while we were building our bar graph. I believe that this was effective because the students were able to not only verbally hear how many votes that bunny or chick but they were able to see which one had more votes. Some of my students are unable to count yet, so even if they couldnt count exactly how many each one had, they were able to see that one had more votes than the other one when comparing them. I believe that these strategies were relevant to the students because they are at an age where they need to be very active in their learning and they need to be able to share their own opinions and thoughts. The students liked watching themselves with the clips that I had put together because it was something new for them. Some of them also enjoyed sharing their opinions while we were in a circle. Our casting our votes and creating our bar graph were also very effective and relevant for the students because this group of students enjoys moving around and being active and becoming full participants in our learning. 2. Cite examples of language supports seen in the clip(s) to help your students understand that content and/or participate in literacy discourse central to the lesson. Prior to this particular lesson my students had been learning the words election, campaign, candidate, vote, and ballot box. Before we began the bulk our the lesson we reviewed what election, vote, and candidate meant. The students knew what each of the words meant because we had been using them the previous three days. I also tried to elicit the students to remember the word ballot box before we were voting, but the students had a harder time remembering that word. After viewing my clips I believe that I didnt use the key vocabulary words as often as I should have been. Some of my students picked up on the target language very quickly, but it took

others a little bit longer. When I re-teach this lesson next year, I will make sure that I hit the target language more. 3. Describe strategies for eliciting student thinking and how your ongoing responses further their learning. Cite examples from the clip(s). Throughout my lesson I asked my students questions to help elicit their thinking. At the beginning of the lesson I elicited questions to review the vocabulary words that we had learned prior to this lesson. I elicited student thinking before we created our graph. I provided the sentence stem I predict . . . to help the students make predictions about who they thought would win. I I also elicited student thinking while we were constructing our bar graph. I asked the students if they could make predictions about who they thought would win using the data that we were creating. 4. Reflection After watching my video I believe that my students did achieve my learning objectives. I wanted my students to become more familiar with the election process so they could better understand what was happening with our current events. I know that my students enjoyed the actual voting and watching their campaign videos that they created. But, if I were to teach this lesson again I would make some changes to increase my students learning and understandings. I didnt wrap up with my students as I would have liked. Instead I ended the lesson telling the students that we were now the Bradwell bunnies. What I should have done was to have the students review everything that we had did over the week and relate it back to the current election. I believe that this would have solidified the learning and helped my students relate this back to the current election. I am not sure if my lower students would understand how this related to the election, but I know that the majority of my students would have grasped the concept. I also believe that I didnt elicit enough student thinking throughout the lesson. I believe that what little questioning I did with the students didnt require them to use higher order thinking skills. One missed opportunity was during the graphing portion of the lesson. I did ask the students to predict who they thought would win, but I should have taken it one step further and asked them to explain their reasoning. I would have needed to been very explicit with the students that I didnt want to hear any more reasons of why they voted for that particular animal, but that I needed them to use the data from the graph that we were creating. I also believe that I needed to have a stronger classroom management persona. Throughout the clip, the majority of my students are engaged, but I also see students who are not as engaged as they should be. A tighter management would have allowed for more time for deeper questioning and thinking from the students. Overall, I feel like this lesson has the substance required to become a great lesson for my future students, but some minor revision, rethinking, and rephrasing will need to happen before it is used again.