Nikki Meyer

Emergent Literacy
Dr. McKool

Poem Book Lesson Reflection

This was my last lesson of the semester and not my most effective. This lesson

was writing and drawing activity, which allowed for interaction amongst the students,

which caused some problems due to the noise level. I had to stop several times to quiet

down the students because they were getting to rowdy, and my cooperating teacher

helped me a lot during the lesson which I greatly appreciated. The students were well

engaged though and excited for the lesson, but even after giving them examples of a

poem book and physically demonstrating to the students what I wanted them to do, I still

faced questions and confusion about the lesson. This disappointed me because I thought

I had explained the lesson well but since multiple students asked me for guidance, I

realized that I hadn’t explained the objective as thoroughly as I had thought.

Overall, the objective was met and the students did in fact create a poem book

based off of an animal and a number. The problem was that a lot of students didn’t

remember they had to use their assigned number in their rhyming sentence and a lot of

students simply wrote a sentence that didn’t rhyme, so that made me feel like the lesson

was a failure. My cooperating teacher reassured me that I did well and it was a good

learning experience, in which case I learned to take into account differentiation more and

be more clear with my instructions and expectations for the students.

Some students had trouble finding rhyming words that rhymed with their animal

because they were very creative with their animal choice, for example, one student wrote

about a dragon and had trouble finding three sentences to create since not many words
rhyme with dragon. A lot of students had trouble understanding that they had to create

three separate sentences around one animal and some thought that the number I gave

them was the number of sentences they had to write. I was disappointed with the

confusion in the classroom and started second guessing me lesson and feeling conflicted

as to whether or not it was appropriate for first graders.

I was pleased with the engagement and excitement the students had for the lesson

and the students created beautiful pictures to accompany their sentences but this lesson

was more of a learning experience for me because it showed me where my weaknesses

are and how I can plan for them next time. The students had fun and were able to rhyme

like I wanted and create a picture to describe their sentence, but only after I answered

some questions were the students able to perform the task. Overall, I’m pleased that the

students enjoyed the lesson, but now I know what to take into account for my next lesson

when it comes to classroom management, directions and differentiation.