Lesson Two Reflection

So far, I've learned that teaching writing in first grade is a much longer process than I originally thought. They need time to learn the practices your're teaching them and then twice as much time to practice them. I also learned that this age group is capable of doing high level writing (in my opinion) as long as they are given appropriate amounts of time to practice. 

With this specific lesson, I feel like I gave a great introduction for what's to come in unit. The small moment chart I made for the unit helped laid out the four components of a small moment style of writing and helped keep their focus on the patterns of these four components in this style of writing. In the unit, we read 5 different small moments and while we were reading, we were trying to decide if the story was, in fact, a small moment story. At the end of the reading, we filled out the chart to check that the story focused on one character, one setting time, one setting place and only one thing happens throughout the whole story. We also counted the pages of each story when we were done to see how many pages the author could fill the book with details. The students didn't seem to struggle with this lesson since the pattern was 1 thing for each component. 

My objective for this lesson was: Students will be able to organize and extend personal/original ideas through planning and rehearsing individually and with partners by doodle brainstorming and creating a WHO, WHAT, WHERE chart. Our W/W/W chart turned into our character, setting - time, setting - place, and what happened? board and they caught onto the pattern of small moments way quicker than I thought they would. They noticed the pattern without me telling them and they could repeat that pattern later on. I want to set up genre and writing patterns in a visual way, when possible, from now on because I learned that my kids understand material well that way. 

Since we came back to the small moment chart whenever we read a sample text, it was really helpful for the students who didn't grasp the pattern initially. Coming back to it every lesson for the first week and seeing that repetition really helped the students, especially when it came time for the students to create their own small moment chart. One thing I really noticed was there is a very large portion of my class that needs to work on writing concepts, especially SPACING! We'll definitely have to pay more attention to that for the rest of our writing lessons.