Standard:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.2.4
Describe how words and phrases (e.g., regular beats, alliteration, rhymes, repeated lines) supply rhythm and meaning in a story, poem, or song.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.2.7
Use information gained from the illustrations and words in a print or digital text to demonstrate understanding of its characters, setting, or plot.
Objective:
Students will be able to infer the meaning of the poem, using text evidence to support their inference.
Overall, I think that the lesson went quite well. There were a few things that I wanted to improve on, and I think they were accomplished. The first thing that I wanted to work on was introducing procedures in the beginning of the lesson to reduce the amount of times I had to correct behavior during the lesson. I remembered to introduce procedures in the beginning of the lesson, making sure the students knew that they were supposed to be in LLP, and listening to the speaker. Although I did have to correct a few behaviors and have the students perform a "LLP" check during the lesson, the amount of times that I had to correct behavior from my last lesson went down. I also think that the students were more engaged when I made sure that they knew what the expectations were.
Before beginning my lesson, I made sure to access the students prior knowledge, reminding them about the story they inferred yesterday. I then introduced the objective for today, which was to infer the meaning of two poems, using evidence from the text. I also reexplained what it meant to infer, so they had a solid understanding of the purpose for read the poem. I also explained that poems have rhythms, and rhymes that help the readers understand the poem, and that give the poem a certain feel, helping them know the structure of the poem and how it is different than a story.
I planned what I was going to infer ahead of time, so I had an idea of what I was going to teach and model to the students, but sometimes, the students come up with better ideas an you, and it is very valuable to go with your students ideas and drop your own. I had made an inference for last stanza, and I was hoping that the students would have grasped the idea of inferring from my modeling and would come to the same conclusion that I did. As I was getting them to go line by line, and infer the meaning of the stanza, one of the students made an amazing inference about the meaning of the text. His meaning was different from what I had planned, but it made sense, and it was ten times better than my inference, because it came from his thinking about the text. I was so excited that he came to this conclusion, even though it was not what I had planned. It was here that I realized that my lessons should be about my students and the ideas that they have. The lessons are more powerful and more meaningful when we use our students ideas, even if it means veering from our plans to follow the thinking of our students.
I graded the assessments, and most of the students performed in the average range, earning a 2 on our rubric, ranged from 0-3. The students were able to infer what the meaning of the text was, they just had difficulty with using text evidence. They had trouble pulling the exact words from the text as to where they got their inference from. Using this data, I would conduce a lesson on how to pull evidence from a text, so they have an understanding of how to do this.