Mini Lessons

Mini Lesson 1:

The first student I worked with is one who is behind in her reading level. While she is not a bad reader she is behind the other students and it is greatly affecting her writing. I had her do a writing piece for me to she how she puts together a story and after giving her a topic so I could see how she relates sounds to letters to words. In her writing she struggled to complete her thoughts in writing and when looking at her spelling she continues to spell as she hears the letters in a word. She also has had a hard time with her handwriting and other people being able to understand her writing. All of this is connected in her frustration with every lesson she does. This reflected when I did the lesson with her because as we started to go over her writing so I could get an understanding of how and why she isn’t making the progressions she needs to she began to cry. This is something that is fragrant with her when we try to help her. I believe that because all of this has a connection to one another she feels a heavy sense of failure. With her frustration she decided she did not want to work with me anymore and wanted to get back to doing what everyone else in the class was doing so we did not get to finish my lesson. My teacher however continues to have her practice her writing and spelling my providing her workbooks to help.

Mini Lesson 2:

For my second mini lesson I worked with the whole class on editing. I was going to use it on just a couple students but after my CT saw it she wanted me to use with the whole class because she believed it was something that every was behind in. What I did was make sets of one to two sentences that had different grammatical errors they learned about earlier in the year. I let them know the number of errors in each one. They then were given time to work individually on finding the errors. Then as a class we went over each type of error and had them as a class inform each grammar error. Having them do this as a class is where I realized was possibly a flaw in what I was doing to seeing where they struggled. This however was because I thought I would be using this with one to two students not 27. However it was still a great help in the development of the students editing skills.