Reflections on First lesson

The first lesson that I taught from the basal text was an introduction to the story, "The Unbreakable Code."  As a class, we read the introductory story the previous day, which spoke about the code talkers that served in Northern Africa.  The first couple pages of the story introduce our main character, John, who is upset about leaving the Navajo reservation for Minnesota.  I focused the discussion of the story on the author's perspective.  What did the author want to emphasize to the reader?

The story told about John's Grandfather who spent his childhood in boarding schools specifically for Native Americans.  My class is very diverse and I wanted to allow these students to relay their personal experiences to the class.  They really opened up about their home languages and customs that have been kept in their homes.  I made sure to speak about this as a class because the class is very interested in the diverse backgrounds of each student. Earlier in the year, a student vocalized how interested he was in someone else's culture but my MT said "We don't have time to talk about it," and never returned to it.  I certainly wanted to get back to the topic to enrich the student's cultural literacy by using their peers to do the teaching.  From this cultural literacy point of view, the lesson went very well as students started to comprehend more of the story as well as started to empathize with the main character.

One thing that I would go back to focus on in the lesson if I could go back in time to plan it is changing the way I approached the topic of author's perspective.  Most students didn't know what perspective was, which came as a surprise to me.  It just proves that I needed to informally assess my students prior knowledge, something which I normally associate with math (I obviously know that that is now incorrect!).  I did not have a good way to explain the concept and was not prepared to do so.  I also need to prepare students if I expect them to contribute.  Especially for my ELLs who would provide much of the cultural content I was looking for, I should have let them know a day or two earlier so they could ask their parents and be prepared to provide any information they felt comfortable sharing.