Weekly Summary #12

Weekly Summary #12

April 9th- 11th

Meghan Taylor

     This is the last and final week of official lesson plans. Next week, I will post-assess my students on everything that we have worked on during this last semester with them. It seems crazy that everything is coming to an end. These last couple of weeks are flying by and it does not seem real that this spring semester is already over.
In my first grade classroom, we have been finishing up working on blend sounds. I wish I planned more time focusing on this section as my students need more work than I expected. But, it is okay. I know that they have learned more with these couple of lessons on blends than they would have without. Every small step counts and I am happy to say that I have helped teach my students. On Tuesday, we focused on a worksheet that differentiated between words that began and ended with blends. Both of my students struggle with words that end with blends, as they seem to forget what sound the digraph or blend makes. If the word begins with the blend, say "shark" they are more likely to pronounce or sound out the word correctly as opposed to a word like "wish." We also focused on which began or ended with "sh" and "ch" as they confused these two blends the most.
On Thursday, we continued working with the blends but finished the lesson with a sight word worksheet. I wanted my last lesson plan to be a little more fun for my students, so I created this worksheet for them. It asked them to circle five of the hardest Fry words that have been struggling with throughout this semester and then "color graph" the words. Simply, they had to color in a box above the sight word they found for each time they found the word. They both enjoy coloring and using colored materials a lot, so I thought this would be an engaging yet academic activity and worksheet that could conclude my official lesson plans. On Friday was Aiden's birthday, and he begged me every two seconds to come in on that day to tell him "Happy Birthday!" No matter how many times I wished him a "Happy Early Birthday," he begged me to come the next day. He even told me to skip work and teaching my other home-schooled students to come celebrate his birthday.
Due to the seminar on Tuesday, I was only with my CSS students for about thirty minutes. During this time, I worked one-on-one with one student as he read and worked through his Achieve articles. He often just guesses and does not read the actual material, so I just sat with him making sure he was working through the problems and actually reading, rather than guessing. On Thursday, I worked on some make-up graded worksheets with one un-enthusiastic student. He grumbles and grunts every time he has to do something school related, claiming that he hates schools. He believes schools is utterly useless. He always completes his work, and accurately, but complains the entire time.