Our fifth lesson at Hennessy targeted the sentence expansion strategy. To begin our lesson, we started by reviewing the activity agenda for the day. We then passed out the students’ writing journals to start our icebreaker. After explaining what a cinquain poem is and showing the students an example poem, they were able to write their own. Each student picked their own topic to write about. As a group, we went through brainstorming and writing each line of their poems. Then, we activated the students’ prior knowledge by discussing what sentence expansion is. We asked if they had ever written an expanded sentence before and what specific details they thought should go in an expanded sentence. To reestablish what we learned from writing a cinquain and to introduce some of the themes from our read-aloud, the students were shown our vocabulary words for the lesson. Each word was written out on a whiteboard with an example the students could relate to. The students followed along by writing each word in their writing journals. Filling in the anchor chart was our last activity before the read-aloud. The students were shown how expanding a sentence focuses on specific details (who, what, when, where, why, how). We used the example sentence “the girl played” and expanded on each of the listed details as a group. Then we did a quick brain break before moving on to the read-aloud.
Our read-aloud book today was The Dark by Lemony Snicket. The students enjoyed this book and were actively answering comprehension questions and pointing out any vocabulary words they heard in the book. We then passed out the graphic organizers for the students to complete. We used the sentence "Laszlo was not afraid of the dark” to guide the completion of the organizer. As a group, we discussed each section and wrote down the most agreed upon student suggestions. Once each section was filled in, the students independently wrote down their fully expanded sentences. We collected the organizers and started our second brain break of the lesson. After the brain break, the students were given sentence strips. They were told to think about their favorite character from a book and write an expanded sentence using all the details we discussed (who, what, when, where, why, how). The students really enjoyed this activity, and each filled multiple sentence strips with writing. Rather than having them continue their writing in their journals, we let the students keep using the sentence strips for the rest of the writing activity. When it was time to end the lesson, we thanked the students for their hard work and cleaned up our table and materials. We gave the students a brief preview of our next and final lesson with them and said our goodbyes for the day.
One strength of the lesson was using dry-erase sentence strips in place of our writing activity. In previous lessons, we used both writing in the journals and on the strips. However, this time, having the students only write on the strips made them feel more comfortable to keep writing as much as possible. Since the strips were dry-erase, the students were able to be creative without the finality of writing on paper. An area of weakness was the timing of some activities. Due to different circumstances, one being absent and one leaving for special education services, two of the students in our group were not present for some of the main content-based activities. Because we were only working with the remaining two students, we progressed through the activities much more quickly than anticipated. To fix this, we extended the timing of the following activities until the student who left for services came back. Then we were able to carry on with the lesson as planned.
I learned from this experience that giving students more than enough time with an activity can be more beneficial in the long run of the lesson. By progressing slowly through each activity of the lesson, the students were able to thoroughly interact with the content we were teaching them. When we realized that the students finished the graphic organizers faster than anticipated, we adapted the rest of the lesson structure. We added an additional element to our second brain break, playing Hangman with vocab and words from the story. We also gave the students more time with their writing at the end of the lesson. This allowed them to think more in depth and creatively about their writing.
This lesson was another insightful experience of adapting a lesson in the moment to any new changes that arise. While planning, we were unaware that one student in our group would no longer be in our lessons. We also didn’t think that the timing of any activities would be much different from previous lessons. However, you never know exactly how a lesson will play out until it is actually happening. This experience allowed me to think critically about timing while actively teaching. It also allowed me to collaborate with my fellow teacher and stay on the same page about how we wanted to continue the lesson.
In the future, I plan to incorporate more informal exercises like using whiteboards or dry-erase strips. I think for the past lessons with these students, both myself and them get caught up on producing some kind of a final product (the graphic organizers). Today’s lesson showed me how much the students enjoy more low-stakes activities. We were still able to teach the students the necessary content for the lesson, but they got to interact with that content in a way that they really enjoyed. For future lessons, I will think about how formal or informal the activities I’m planning may come across to the students. I think that including a mix of both will be beneficial to the students’ comprehension of the content.
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