Lesson 4 Johnson

Malea Vitt and Katrina Cronin

Entry #4

November 12th, 2021

Experience Narrative: Friday was our fourth day of Service Learning teaching at Johnson Elementary. We taught our 4th grade class which has about 28 students in total. They were very engaged in learning our newest lesson on perspective and space. In this class we introduced our fourth lesson which was creating tin foil relief sculptures that focused on building students technique when talking about shading and relief which we our utilizing in our final project. There were a couple of small issues the greatest of which was our time management during this lesson but all the students were able to complete their project and we received some helpful tips from both Ms.England and Claire. We also talked more about creating even more anchors for students like pre-cut circles to help the students continue to have more tools for them to create with. The insight I gained was while I am becoming better at thinking through what could be a problem area in my lesson I really need to analyze and think what areas could cause struggles that I am not accounting for and build tools for those areas as well.

What Worked Well / Interpretation/Content Meaning: I did include more anchors and instruction to help students visualize the lesson and I feel as if this really helped several of the students. And I feel as though our definition and examples of relief really helped the students understand and relate to relief in a meaningful way. They were also able to describe it easier and draw that connection to a print they can see and touch. I think having those connections helped them relate and connect to the material in a more meaningful way and scaffold their learning from something they know into something they are mostly familiar with.

What Did Not Work / Personal Significance: As was discussed there were some time management issues during this lesson, we received great tips from Claire as to prepping things even more prior to the teaching, this will help with time management, or even doing our instruction sheet in paint or in color to teach the shading earlier on so we do not have to do it later. There were also sections that had more filler than what was necessary which we can cut in the future to give students more work time for their actual project. All of these tips and more prep time beforehand are things that I learned could help me be better in time management so the students aren't feeling rushed and we really focus on the most important sections of the activity. I think by employing these techniques and continuing to focus on time in the future I will build stronger time schedules and know when to move on from something and when to keep something in. Moral of the story is by really analyzing beforehand what the lesson in about and why I am teaching it I can spend more time teaching what is important and letting the students have enough time to work.

Future Actions: In the future, I will take into consideration all of the most important areas of my lesson and make those the longest sections, I will also focus on time management skills and build techniques that will allow for quicker and easier prep for all types of materials. I think in situations like these when I am in my own classroom I would like to employ TAB skills to allow students to use and distribute their own materials. I feel as though allowing myself to really think through material prep and those areas of the lesson it will help me think through what ways I can prep a lesson in a way that is easy for me and also say for the students. I feel by recognizing these areas where I need to focus more on things like transitions and time I will be able to be more confident in all areas of creating a lesson, and that confidence will benefit not only me but my students and teaching.