Sound+Sort+Reflection

Kelly Nolan Dr. McKool Sound Sort Reflection February 24th, 2011

On February 24th I taught a lesson on words beginning and ending with the letter P. This was the first lesson I ever taught and to say I was nervous would be an understatement. For this lesson I did a picture sort using the pocket chart in the classroom and then I had students create a T-chart with pictures I provided. On one side they had words beginning with P and on the other side words ending in P.

The lesson met the objective which was that students be able to recognize and sort words beginning and ending with the letter P. The students were able to meet the objective because the lesson I presented was easy for them to understand and I gave them a lot of examples so that they were easily able to compare the sounds in other words to the examples.

Although the lesson succeeded in meeting the objective there were some things that went wrong. One of the things that went wrong was that the students were very disruptive and calling out. I believe that this happened because I did not set clear expectations for behavior before the lesson began and I did not positively reinforce good behavior. One other thing that did not go so well was that in the morning class a few times when I called students to the front to sort the words they told me the correct answer (beginning or ending) but they put the picture on the wrong side and I was so busy trying to control the class that I did not notice until the end. It was quite embarrassing for me when we went back over the pictures and the students found the mistakes. Hopefully as my management skills improve things like this will no longer happen.

From this lesson I learned that I need to make it more clear to the students when they should be raising their hands to answer and when they should be answering together. I also learned that I need to pay better attention to answers students are putting in front of the class because the students all knew who had made the mistakes and we need to give every student the opportunity to succeed.