Mother to Son.mp4

Direct Instruction

In this lesson I had just introduced inferencing to the class and took a small group to apply the skill to a poem. I usually introduce the skill of inferencing using images so that students get the hang of using evidence (in this case what they see in the image) to justify their inferences. You can watch an example of this here.

Extended plan here

Reflection

I really enjoyed this lesson, particularly sharing a picture book with my learners - in hindsight I should have recorded this with a group as the discussion we had was fantastic! It was good to move swiftly on to reading poetry with this group however, as it was a great challenge for them and they had a lot of questions regarding the way it was written before we got into discussing the text at an inferential level.

Things to note

I'm eight months pregnant in this video so my appearance looks a little different! I also cut a lot of the discussion we had in this lesson to focus on the learning intention I had assigned, but we actually spent a while discussing the authors voice. In the poem Langston Hughes uses spelling and apostrophes to replicate an accent which the students had a lot of questions about.