Teaching and Reteaching

I have spent my time in the classroom this week teaching a unit on ‘families’. On Tuesday, I taught two lessons to introduce the topic (or get students thinking more deeply about it, as they all have some experiences and understanding of families). The students shared their prior understanding about what makes a family, listened to and interacted with a book about different types of families, listed family members, and finally got the chance to draw and label a picture of their family. The next lesson (taught today - Thursday) was about the responsibilities that different family members have:

(1) Learning target:
At the end of the lesson, the students will be able to:
-Understand that different family members have different responsibilities
-Write a numbered list of responsibilities from their families
-Classify responsibilities as “big people jobs” or “little people jobs”

During this lesson, after defining the word ‘responsibility’ and hearing me give examples of family responsibilities, the students had the opportunity to create a list of responsibilities people in their families do (after watching me model this type of writing). Then, we thought about who does these jobs in our families and labeled them as ‘big people’ (grownup) jobs or ‘little people’ (kid) jobs (marking each item on the list with a ‘B’ or ‘L’). The students also shared one item from their list with the class and told us if it was a big or little person job.

(2) Evidence:
The students all wrote lists of responsibilities people in their house have (students’ lists ranged from 3 to 10 items), labeled them based on who performs each task and shared a responsibility with the class. The students were, overall, very successful with each piece of this lesson – every student labeled their list (some with support) and shared a responsibility with the class. I gauged individual levels of success based on the types of things students wrote on their list (i.e. whether they used ideas that I had shared or brainstormed different ideas).

(3) Reteach:
If I were to reteach this lesson, I would offer more explanation and guidance for writing aspect of the lesson. Although the main objective of the lesson was focused on social studies, this was also an important writing lesson (learning to write a list). I explained and modeled list writing explicitly , but I wish I would have connected it to the writing they do on a daily basis because a few students were very worried about spelling and how to write things the ‘right’ way. After some explanations from my CT and I that this was just like the writing we do in our writing folders, where you write down all the sounds you can hear, students felt more confident to write freely. Explaining this in advance would have eliminated some of this confusion some students felt.

(4) Extend:
To extend this lesson, I could ask students who have successfully met the learning goal of identifying responsibilities to think a little deeper and explain why they think people have these responsibilities. This is something I quickly asked all students at the end of my lesson, to help extend their thinking, but I think posing the question to some students prior to this would have given them a chance to really think about why these jobs and important and, perhaps, share some ideas with their classmates.