Lesson: Vocabulary Comprehension and Characters
Date: October 27th, 2022
I taught a small group of 5th-level reading multicultural students during this lesson. The objective of this lesson was for students to comprehend some of the more challenging vocab and be able to describe and identify characters from the short story they read.
This lesson focused primarily on reading and writing. Students had to read vocab from the PowerPoint and find the definition using their phone or a dictionary. Some speaking was used when students were asked to give the definition for certain words and to describe their character to the class.
After students were given enough time to go through the vocabulary students were asked one at a time to give the definition to the class. After this students were given a character card and had a short amount of time to come up with the literary devices and adjectives to describe that character. The other students had to guess which character they were describing.
This lesson was great practice for not having the number of students that I originally planned for. This class usually has 10-12 students but this week only 6 students had shown up. While the vocabulary aspect of the lesson was easily adapted for fewer students, for the second part of the lesson I had to give out one less character for the students to describe.
What I found challenging was staying within the time that I had set for each part of the lesson. Students came back a little late from their lunch and so I had less time than anticipated. Some students also hadn’t read the short story by this time and had difficulty defining the vocab. To try and help this I paired students who had read the story with those who had not.
Now reflecting on this lesson while pairing those with had done their homework and those who had not is an easy way to balance out groups and have a smooth lesson it is also unfair for the students who had done the work to now have to help those who had not.
I really enjoyed this lesson because since there were fewer students it was much easier to check on each student. It was also much easier to listen in on the partner discussion without having to hover over their shoulder.