This week I observed Mrs. Davoren 4th grade class. During my time there, the class went over language arts. The students were informed of the classroom language and the content objective. The students were told they would be learning how to describe the theme of a poem using appropriate descriptive words. The teacher introduced nine words to the students: kindness, friendship, compassion, cooperation, courage, responsibility, acceptance, honesty, and preservatives. Mrs. Davoren’s classroom desk arrangement consists of groups of five. Each group was given two words to define and present in front of the classroom. After familiarizing the students with the appropriate language to use when identifying a theme of a poem the teacher had them practice …show more content…
Davoren calls on willing participants to read a section of the poem out loud well the other students followed along. After the poem had been completely read, students had to write what they felt the theme of the poem was. They had to use the nine words they had just learned. Afterward, they had to highlight sentences in the poem to support the theme they picked. Once all the students were done, she had the students tell her, out loud, what they thought the theme was and why they thought it was correct. Using their highlighted sentence as evidence. Mrs. Davoren alternated different learning arrangement to best benefit the students.
Mrs. Davoren uses two different configurations for this lesson, small and large collaborations. She uses a large collaboration to introduce the topic, objective, introduction to the language, a presentation of the define words and for an assignment. During the assignment, Mrs. Davoren infused everything they had learned together. She used a small collaboration to help students identify the different descriptive themes. This allowed students to bounce ideas off one another and creatively come up with a presentation to teach the theme words to the