Class Reflection- Week 4

I connected a lot to the punctuation portion of today's class because I actually saw the importance of punctuation in my field experience, earlier this morning. I am in a 1st grade class at University School, so my students are only learning the basics of punctuation, and so far they have covered when to use periods, exclamation points, question marks at the end of different sentences.  Today, the students worked together as a class to come up with sentences using their spelling words. My cooperating teacher, Mrs. McGurry, would call on a student, and that student would have to come up with a sentence using a particular spelling word. The student was able to decide if that sentence would be a statement (ending in a period), an feeling sentence (using an exclamation point) or a question sentence (ending in a question mark). After the student described what kind of sentence it should be, Mrs. McGurry would read the sentence using the punctuation that was called for (Ex: being really excited and loud if the sentence ended with an exclamation point). Mrs. McGurry did a good job of modeling how the sentence should sound with that specific type of punctuation. Also, during Literacy groups, I have noticed that in the books that my students are reading, there are many commas and apostrophes used.  I haven't actually seen the students write using commas and apostrophes, but they have been introduced to them. Today's theme was reading books with the word "that's" which was in place of "that is."

On a separate note, I really enjoyed sharing our "Craft Lessons" with our small groups today.  It was a good way for us to learn about different lessons that we could potentially use in our future classrooms. I liked seeing how certain books worked really well with specific lessons, and it gave me new ideas for how to incorporate picture books into more advanced lessons.