MGCoA Episode 13.mov

Direct Instruction

In this lesson, the children had to read a text, Back to the Drawing Board, from a Connected series book. The purpose of this reading lesson was to encourage the children to use the illustrations and photos in the text to support their understanding. Through the text, they were learning new, specific language which was linked to our term inquiry into art.

The follow up task had the children to refer back to the text to gain the understanding required to answer the questions/ do the activities.

Extended plan here

Reflection

The group of children came away from this lesson with a strong understanding of the main ideas of the text. The children demonstrated an eagerness to learn and a deep understanding through the discussion as well as through the follow up task.

My management of the group throughout discussions can focus more on ensuring the children do not talk over each other. Just like we do in maths, the expectations of group discussions need to be explicitly stated at the start of each discussion. The difficulty of this is that I don't want to take away from the energy and enthusiasm these children have of taking risks in sharing their ideas with the group. Even though at times, the children are talking over each other, this also demonstrates that they feel confident to share their ideas.

I need to do some inquiring into how other teachers set up group reading sessions for children reading at this level. How do they ensure that they hear the children read without loosing engagement. This group are highly engaged through deep group discussions around texts.