Language Arts Unit

Language Arts Unit Plan

Practicum Reflection

Many teachers were observed delivering and teaching different perspectives so that the teaching career can be planned. Diversity of students in class and different levels of understanding and learning can be challenging for the teachers. Every student is required to meet the standards of the grade to optimize their learning. Teachers need to create a flow with literacy and learning encompassing all parts of the curriculum. Teachers must identify all the students' needs. Related strategies must be implemented by the teacher to improve the reading and writing skills in students. Four classrooms were observed within a time period of two months. The main classes observed involved the language art lessons. Relevant literature reading and writing was taught by oneself in a five-day course.

The first teacher observed was an English Teacher of 5th grade, Mrs Zareena. She was teaching English grammar and literature since seven years to 5th Grade. She started by developing an understanding of the story of novel and the objective of the class. She used the strategy of linking the relevant characters and stories so that the students can memorize and easily learn the new story and its characters and features. She read the story page to page and uses to teach every difficult word, paragraph, sentence or illustration in the novel. The key words learnt were highlighted on the board for the class. The students were asked to compare the characters, events, places and similarities. She used to show the plot, and characters in pictorial forms by bring related pictures of characters and events in the class. The activity of the classroom was engaging and enjoyable.

In the next class, the same teacher referred to the vocabulary words from the novel for the students to read from the board. Before starting the novel, Mrs Zareena evaluated the prior knowledge of the students so that she could proceed in the way the learning and understanding of the students require her to. She again introduced the novel's story to the students. She discussed the main characters of the novel and gave their brief introduction. The students were requiring finding meanings of difficult words from dictionary and to form sentences from those words, writing the related synonyms. This activity wasn't interesting to the students and many students lost their interest in the class. Many students were distracted because they weren't participative and their knowledge wasn't according to the flow of the class' discussion. To solve the issue of distraction, Mrs Zareena used the word web in class for the attention and participation of students so that they don't lose their interest and go with the flow.

Think Aloud strategy was used and applied by Mrs Zareena through which the comprehension of the novel was discussed. She related the events and plots of the novel with the real events and characters for better and improvised understanding. The story related to the main character, Pip and how he faced problems when he was poor, how he became ...