My Observation Field Notes

Marquetta Strait February 12, 2013 EDUC: 421: Teaching Language Arts to Children Mrs. Saxon

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Marquetta Strait February 12, 2013 EDUC: 421: Teaching Language Arts to Children Observation Field Notes

Observation Field Notes

While doing my field experience at Denmark-Olar Elementary School, my field experience mentor, Ms. Benjamin-Davis, taught her fourth grade class a lesson on expository writing. In this lesson, she wanted to teach the students how to come up with a great

introduction paragraph for their writing. The students are preparing for their PASS test and the writing portion of the test is approaching in March. The topic that the students had was How can bullying affect a person? The teacher associates the writing process to a burger in her instruction. She says that the bun of the burger is the introduction. Within the students introduction, they begin their writing with questions to grab the attention of the reader. The teacher calls the topic sentence juicy or some type of writing that will be appealing to readers. She explains to her class that the topic sentence must be fascinating, but it also must be appropriate to the writers topic. She probes the students on which juicy questions they can ask in their writing. After giving the students time to ponder on their questions, she then asks the students to share their ideas. As the students share their ideas, she gives the students feedback. I believe this is a great strategy to use so that students can hear their peers perspectives. If the students question was not up to par,

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she will respond Good try. Would anyone like to assist your classmate to make their question stronger? After the students came up with their questions, the teacher instructed the students to continue on to their body paragraph in their composition journals. The teacher associates the body paragraphs to the meat of their burger and any details as the toppings, such as lettuce, tomatoes, or pickles. The students were instructed to discuss three points from their introduction paragraph and include details about the three points in their body paragraphs. After which, the students transitioned to their conclusion, the bottom burger bun. The conclusion was referred to the wrap-up to their writings. Overall, I feel that the lesson will assist the students on future writing prompts. Hopefully, the students will remember the writing process in association to the burger method. By implementing the language arts strategies, such as having a grand conversation about questions that they could use for their writing was a great way for the students to have dialogue while staying on task. I am hoping to see more language arts strategies implemented in my field experience classroom.