Idiom+Reflection

Throughout the planning stages of our idiom lesson, I found that sometimes it is extremely difficult to work with a partner. There are times when your ideas clash or you both want to teach the same part of the lesson. Writing this lesson with a classmate has shown me what it is like to co-teach. I feel that it was a great experience in learning how to deal with people who are very opinionated and have different ideas from you. I feel that after we got past the difficult parts of the lesson, we worked well planning it and making sure we each had ample teaching opportunities.

Although there were some difficulties working with my classmate, the overall planning of the lesson went well. I found it easy to decide on my dialogue before teaching the lesson and being intimidated in the front of the classroom. The most difficult part of this lesson was deciding how to explain to the students what an idiom was. There are many definitions and forming our own for fourth graders to understand was complicated. The students seemed to have understood what an idiom was through our examples which made our lesson flow smoothly. Our cooperating teacher gave us the idea for the activity and said she had done it in previous years. It was less pressure having the activity handed to us; we just then had to figure out how to implement it.

Overall, I feel our lesson went extremely well. The students were engaged while we were discussing idioms and giving examples. They all wanted to participate and think of their own idioms. It seemed as though the students thoroughly understood what an idiom was and how to use it in context. Students were asked to write down idioms they found interesting while being read the book “My Teacher Likes to Say” by Denise Brennan-Nelson. The students then discussed these idioms and what they thought the idioms meant. During guided practice, my partner and I gave the students an idiom and asked them to come up with a definition and a sentence using the idiom. A few students were called on.

During the lesson, the students were engaged. The chatting was to a minimum since students were working intently. During the activity, students were given an idiom and a sentence using the idiom. The students had to see if they could come up with a definition or hidden meaning for the idiom and create their own sentence. Then students would have to draw a picture depicting the sentence. This activity was fun for students since they were allowed to be creative. To ensure students understood their idiom, I went around and placed a card on students’ desks that I thought was appropriate for the ability of the specific student. Also, students were asked to write their sentences out in their writer’s notebook before writing them on the construction paper. This allowed the teachers to check over the student’s work and correct it if necessary.

In all, I feel that our lesson was successful. Students understood what was expected to them and performed to the best of their abilities. A few students mentioned how fun the activity was and how much they enjoyed doing it. This made me smile since I know that we taught a valuable and unique lesson. Throughout the day students would tell our cooperating teacher when she used an idiom and they would have a conversation about it. The students seemed to understand the concept of our lesson extremely well. We could tell this through their sentences, hidden meaning, and definitions on their construction paper.