Well... that didn't go so well!

I greatly appreciate my associate teacher giving me the opportunity to teach lessons during my internship days before I got into my block. It allowed me to see what teaching strategies work well with this particular group of Grade Three's. I became aware of what does not work well for this class! During my second language lesson, I was teaching Haiku poems and what the proper format is when writing these particular poems. The topic was to be about autumn and describe, through a Haiku poem, what they saw in various pictures of autumn that I had provided them with. I was standing in front of the class, going step by step of what needs to be in each line of a Haiku and the amounts of syllables for each line. We created a list of autumn words, and I read to them examples of a Haiku poem. They were then supposed to analyze the picture they had received, and describe what they see. Well...this did not go over very well!! While the students were working on their poems, I walked around to each seating group and realized that there were only a few students who were applying the proper format. My instructions must not have been clear enough or maybe I rushed, but for whatever reason, they just did not totally understand. My associate then asked how I felt it went, and I was very unsure of myself at that point. However, she said that it was very important for me to have experienced a lesson like this and to just realize that it didn't work, and say "oh well", and move on! So that's what I did! The next day in placement I had the chance to re-teach the same lesson. I used a different strategy and had them sit with me on the carpet and they created an example poem as a whole class. This seemed to work beautifully for this class and the lesson was a success! Even though it seemed very discouraging at the time, I really am grateful for my failed lesson!!