Small Group Activity
My small group activity was done with a group of second grade students at Pitts School Road Elementary. The activity I chose was a guided reading lesson, using the play, Silver and Stripes. The purpose of this guided reading lesson was to teach story structure, specifically the structure of a play. I worked with the children in the room that were at the reading level of the chosen story, reading level K. We sat at teacher led group work table and read the text. Children were assigned certain characters roles and read those respected roles as they occurred in the play. Prior to beginning the text, questions were asked to check for comprehension and play structure was discussed. After the lesson, the story was summarized with a series of questioning that laid out the plot and moral of the story. The children that I worked with were at a very high reading level. They did very well reading their lines and had little to no difficulty with pronunciations or confusion with the play structure. They seemed to enjoy reading a play very much.
All things considered, the lesson went well. Luckily, and coincidentally the class was simultaneously being prepared to go to a play in a few weeks at the time of the activity. They had background knowledge about plays. As stated earlier, this was a group of high level readers who had no difficulties. My only critique of the activity would be that it ended up not creating new knowledge for the students. It didn’t challenge them in any real way, and at best it just reinforced what they already knew. If I were to do this again, I would find a text that was more of a challenge for the group of students that I was working with. Doing so would create some difficulty for them and result in a learning experience. As stated earlier, even though the lesson went smoothly and all things considered well; the students didn’t build on existing knowledge. My intention was to strengthen their understanding of story structure, in this instance plays.
My small group activity was done with a group of second grade students at Pitts School Road Elementary. The activity I chose was a guided reading lesson, using the play, Silver and Stripes. The purpose of this guided reading lesson was to teach story structure, specifically the structure of a play. I worked with the children in the room that were at the reading level of the chosen story, reading level K. We sat at teacher led group work table and read the text. Children were assigned certain characters roles and read those respected roles as they occurred in the play. Prior to beginning the text, questions were asked to check for comprehension and play structure was discussed. After the lesson, the story was summarized with a series of questioning that laid out the plot and moral of the story. The children that I worked with were at a very high reading level. They did very well reading their lines and had little to no difficulty with pronunciations or confusion with the play structure. They seemed to enjoy reading a play very much.
All things considered, the lesson went well. Luckily, and coincidentally the class was simultaneously being prepared to go to a play in a few weeks at the time of the activity. They had background knowledge about plays. As stated earlier, this was a group of high level readers who had no difficulties. My only critique of the activity would be that it ended up not creating new knowledge for the students. It didn’t challenge them in any real way, and at best it just reinforced what they already knew. If I were to do this again, I would find a text that was more of a challenge for the group of students that I was working with. Doing so would create some difficulty for them and result in a learning experience. As stated earlier, even though the lesson went smoothly and all things considered well; the students didn’t build on existing knowledge. My intention was to strengthen their understanding of story structure, in this instance plays.