Days 1 and 2- My First Experience!

        This reflection is about Day 1 (and day 2) of my literacy unit plan. On the first day, I had students tell me what a non-fiction text was and had them brainstorm various text features they had heard of, seen or used while reading a non-fiction text. I had students use the think-pair-share model so all students would have an opportunity to have an idea in case I pulled their popsicle stick out in order to ask them to participate. In this lesson, student’s reviewed/ learned various non-fiction text features. As I showed them various non-fiction text features, they were able to fill out a fill in the blank worksheet as we went through the lesson so that they could have these notes as something to refer back to when they were doing the activity for day 2. Some students who had a hard time paying attention to lessons had a difficult time filling in the blanks on the worksheet but I made sure that everyone had it filled in by the end of the lesson and allowed students to look off my copy if they had a hard time filling it in and listening to the lesson because I wanted to make sure that they had the information. From this lesson I realized that students need more practice with non-fiction text features so they know how to use them to aid in their reading of a non fiction text. I think they did good during my lesson but they definitely need to explore non fiction texts and have a real opportunity to use text features while they are doing real reading. During day 2 of my lesson, students were able to look at their textbooks and other non-fiction books in the classroom and discover various text features and point them out (by putting what they found on a worksheet). Some students struggled with this because they were off task and had a hard time locating text features if they weren’t actually reading the text (I hope that makes sense). Like I started to discuss above, I think that my students need more REAL interaction with non-fiction text features, which is something I hope to explore during the rest of my lessons. I will re-teach and re-explore what non-fiction text features are throughout the remainder of my lessons, as we will start to use KWL charts to build our knowledge off of non-fiction text features. Students will have many more opportunities to interact with non-fiction text features as I move through my lessons because we will be using non-fiction texts. I will continue to point out text features and allow students to explore their uses and functions throughout my unit. If I was to do these two lessons again, I might just have students use only one text book during their search rather than having unlimited books at their disposal. I think this would keep them on task and they wouldn’t be so overwhelmed with the opportunity to look through many different books (which some students were distracted by, I think). So far, I haven’t done a ton of work with my core practice because this was just an intro to text features, but I did realize that having students brainstorm what they already knew about non-fiction texts as well as non-fiction text features helped them get ready for the lesson and reminded them of what they already knew. It also helped me with my instruction for the lesson because it helped me gauge what I needed to spend less time on (glossary, bold print) and more time on (index, how to use a table of contents, and graphs on pages).