This week we introduced beginning, middle, and end formally. On Monday, we used the poem "Little Miss Muffet" for the students to begin to identify the beginning, middle, and end of the poem. We used a graphic organizer and the poem to show students the beginning, middle, and end, instead of having the students write on the first day of learning this content we waited until day two. The next day, we reviewed beginning, middle, and end using the graphic organizer from the day before, I had students retell the poem using what we had written the day before. After reviewing, we jumped into our new poem and nursery rhyme "Humpty Dumpty". I wrote the poem on a piece of chart paper to allow for all students to have access to the text as well as to circle the beginning, middle, and end as they were identified. Pictured above shows the final product. After identifying the beginning, middle, and end students were then given there own graphic organizer (which matched the one used the day before) and sent off to identify the parts. Something that surprised me about my students was that all were able to correctly identify the beginning and middle but for the ending they had written the next sentence which was "And all the kings horses and all the kings men" instead of saying that they couldn't put him together again. This realization made me think that we needed to talk about summarizing or thinking about what we write because most of my kiddos had just copied and not thought about it.
On a side note, this lesson was a relatively short lesson which always leaves me with the feeling that I haven't taught enough or I haven't spent enough time going over the content with the students. I conveyed this feeling to my CT who helped remind me that the county encourages teachers to do 10-15 minute lessons and then allow students to work on their own. That it is best teaching practice to give students the most time possible to work things out while being there to catch them before they frustrate out.
And that's all for this week,
Ms. Brookes