Parts of Speech Lesson Plan, Take 1: Assignment 3B

After I gave my students their pre-assessments, I decided to continue on with my original lesson plan for Monday’s class.  Given my student’s work schedules, I had to present the lesson on a different night of the week from when I presented the pre-assessment.  In my junior high classroom, however, the pre-assessment, presentation, review sheet, and post-assessment will all occur in the same class period.  

I started the lesson off with a power point presentation, but before the presentation began, I reminded my students to take notes as they would need them to complete the worksheet later.  When I teach parts of speech, I use this wonderful power point created by Capital Community College.  Its graphics and sound effects are far beyond anything I could create, so I borrowed it. 

I expected my presentation to take about 10 minutes.  It took 17.  Perhaps I speak too much during each slide.  I will need to work on that.  This seems to be a trend with my expectations; things always take longer than planned. 

 

After the presentation, I passed out the parts of speech worksheet which consists of 20 questions (2 -3 per part of speech).  Since I am dealing with such a small class, I paired Ryan with Tessa, and Carol with Matt (i.e. Top 1/3 students with bottom 1/3 students).   I walked around the table to monitor.  The four students asked two questions of me the entire time. After about 7 minutes of working, I showed the students this video that can be found on youtube.  It reiterates the 8 parts of speech. I have found that re-teaching in different words and formats, even within the same lesson, can help me reach more students and increase their retention of the material.  One student might remember the video’s information, while another might remember an example from the power point.  Still another might recall an actual phrase that I used to explain a concept during the presentation.  In any event, after the 7-8 minute video, the students went on to finish their worksheets, and after about 10 minutes, I collected the worksheets.   

Before I dismissed the students, I asked for the Fist of Five; how confident did the students feel about their parts of speech knowledge?  I briefly explained the concept to them.  Because I have only 4 students, I felt I knew what to expect; I assumed the pre-assessment results would reflect the post-assessment’s.  I was surprised, however.  Matt and Carol held up 5’s and Tessa and Ryan held up 4’s.  Given their pre-assessment scores, I assumed Matt and Tessa would not feel comfortable or want to learn or retain anything dealing with grammar; I expected these two to show me 3’s and 4’s.  I was wrong.  They both said they just needed a quick reminder of the definitions of the eight parts of speech and examples of the way each part works in a sentence. 

Later, I graded the worksheets. 

Worksheet results:

Carol & Matt: +19/20

Ryan & Tessa: +17/20

Both groups did very well.  Carol and Matt missed an adverb in one of the sentences and Ryan and Tessa missed an adverb, a conjunction, and failed to create a sentence with a pronoun.  I did show the students their grades, and all could see why they had missed the questions that they had. 

What did I learn and what would I change?

From this assignment, I learned that I need to work on my time management.  I tend to assume that pre-assessment, presentations, worksheet completion, and post-assessment will all take far less time than they actually do.  In reality, I wouldn’t have been able to present all that I had planned for Monday: the pre-assessment took the students 20 minutes, the power point presentation took me 17 minutes, the video was 7.5, the worksheet 17, and the post-assessment 3.  This means it took me 64.5 minutes to get through this lesson.  That’s a FAILED lesson plan if I’ve ever seen one; the students wouldn’t have been in class long enough to finish the worksheet.  I can definitely cut time off of my power point presentation and the pre-assessment.  That should do the trick…just barely. 

 What did I enjoy?

I really enjoy grammar in general, so I had some fun teaching my family members this small bit of content.  In general though, I much prefer being the “guide on the side” as opposed to the “sage on the stage”.  The moments I enjoyed the most occurred when I was monitoring and assisting my students as they completed their worksheets.  I enjoyed hearing them talk their way through each problem and use collaboration to find the correct answer.  I enjoyed hearing their thought processes as they faced these grammar problems; I find it interesting because almost everyone approaches the problem in a different way or rationalizes the correct answer differently. 

Overall, this was a good practice run for me.  It has reminded me to overestimate the time required to execute a lesson plan.