28th April 2010
Today’s blog will focus on reading and writing- the typical program on a Wednesday- and the instructional resources used to deliver an effective teaching lesson in English. My colleague teacher excitedly informed me that today would be kindergarten’s first shared/guided reading lesson. The lesson would focus on The Gingerbread Kid by Paul Galdone and the letter of the week, ‘O’. Every Monday, students are introduced to a new letter through a short chant or rhyme that can be referenced back to the short story.
The day would unfold with shared reading of the book, writing and constructing sentences with the letter, O and an afternoon of reading and writing activities amongst a few other lessons. One of the activities included cutting out a series of illustrations (not necessarily in order) taken directly from the book and rearranged in order to coincide with the events from the story. Students were required to retell their favourite part or even the whole story.
The resources used in the various activities were predominantly visual:
- Smartboard – for teacher demonstration on writing the letter, O and sentences containing this letter
- Storybook – The Gingerbread Boy by Paul Galdone
- Worksheets – required for tracing and writing the letter, O and other sentences to build writing skills of students through practice
- Word cylinder models – used in constructing word sentences
- Illustrations worksheet – for retelling of the story, The Gingerbread Boy
- Workbooks – for further practice of writing skills
- Flash cards – connecting and recalling words in a game called Word Bingo
Audio-visual resources were only of a single type:
- Computer – interactive reading program
As in Barry and King’s (1998) Developing instructional skills in Beginning Teaching and Beyond (3rd ed.), I did find the resources used helped students to learn more effectively by:
- Reinforcing, integrating, and extending classroom instruction (worksheets, word cylinder models, writing workbooks, computer aided interactive reading program)
- Helping in the recall of information (illustrations worksheet, flashcards)
- Helping to gain and maintain interest in a lesson – I believe this to be so because the activities were of only a 20 minute duration and were conducted in a rotational format
- Making learning more meaningful by providing an organized structure that gives concepts learned a concrete representation
In addition to the information resources used however, it was evident that without the support of the teacher and assistant staff to guide and provide mentoring during the activities or to provide instruction in how to use the resources the information resources on their own would not have been sufficient enough to deliver a purposeful learning experience. Within my group, I observed that offering praise for good work and for trying to do well, motivated students more than the activity itself. Also, supervision was absolutely necessary to ensure students were actually completing the tasks at each work station correctly and in an efficient and safe manner. For and early stage 1 class however, it probably shouldn’t be expected that students are able to work independently for extended periods of time due to their short attention spans and mischievous nature.
Barry, K. & King, L. (1998). Developing instructional skills. In Effective teaching and Professional Practice Handbook (pp160-171). Australian Catholic University Ltd,
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