When I was told by my CT that I was teaching the students shapes as my connected lesson, I knew I wanted to bring nature into the classroom (as being a naturalist). I thought, what better way than taking the students outside to explore the shapes that naturally occurring in the outside environment. This gave them not only a stronger understanding that shapes exist everywhere and not just though manipulatives, but also they were able to really explore and use creative thinking to learn.

As a teacher, you are constantly connecting lessons back to another lesson throughout the school day; however, as an intern you don’t have the opportunity to do that as often as a normal working teacher does. For this lesson, I was able to collect data from the day before in order to adjust my lesson according to the needs that I saw from my students. The lesson topic was on two dimensional shapes such as circle, triangle, square, and rectangle. For this lesson I used a formative assessment that involved the students completing a shape hunt exit ticket worksheet. From that, I was able to see what students needed to be challenged and what students needed extra support for this lesson. In this lesson, the students were going to go outside and find shapes in the natural environment and label their drawings with words. The students were going to work collaboratively with their peers (groups made from their formative assessment) and learn through doing rather than being a passive warm body in the room. I think that because this was a connected lesson, I had more confidence teaching this lesson than the ones from the past. This might be because I knew what the students had learned yesterday, and I had full confidence in what information they knew and what information they still needed a strong foundation in. The thing I really liked that I did for this lesson was my explicit directions. That has been something that I have struggled with the past couple of lessons, however, this time I made sure to explain everything and not to leave anything out. These students need every detail when it comes to directions, and especially since the students were going to be doing something that was out of their normal routine, explicit instruction was necessary. I felt as though because I did give such clear directions, the students didn’t stray from the activity, they stayed on topic the entire time, no behavior problems, no complaining, no questions. Additionally, another thing that I liked that I did was the discussion after the lesson. I think that discussion is something that is sparsely used in kindergarten because we think they are not structured enough for it. However, these students were perfectly capable of staying focused, attentive, and respectful for this discussion. During the discussion, I asked the students what they liked about the activity and they input their opinions in a very informative way.

Even though there were good things, there are always things that I could improve on. Some of these things were my differentiation skills. Although I had differentiated the lesson activity, I felt that I should have given more of an enriching opportunity such as letting students find different types of shapes other than circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles. Something that went differently than what I had planned was the speed of the entire lesson. My lesson from the day before took a good 40/45 minutes, so I was expecting the students to take around 40 minutes for this one too. However, the students stayed on task so much that they didn’t need as much time as what I thought. This isn’t something necessarily bad, however, the speed could have been influenced by my lack of challenge for some of the students.

The aspect of the lesson that I was surprised about was the conversations that I was hearing from the students. The collaboration groups were collaborating in a very mature way, in that they were feeding off of each other’s knowledge and building upon each other’s strengths. The groups were heterogenous so that the students would benefit from each other in multiple ways. These groups allowed my ELL student to be able to thrive in the activity because she had visual cues and was able to watch her fellow peers in what they were doing. The differentiation of adding in the sentence starter “I see…” gave her the ability to see how that sentence would look.