Advocacy Lesson 6 Reflection

Lesson #6 was the last lesson with this group of fourth graders and was focused mainly on advocacy. To begin this lesson Miss. Karlie and I decided to create individual awards for each of the students and pass each one out to recognize each of the students hard work. Each award was different and given to the students based on what they did well during each of the six lessons. The students enjoyed receiving these awards and were excited to find out that they were able to take them home with them. After each award was passed out, we then went over our list of learning expectations so the students were reminded of what was expected during the lesson. For this last week we had six new vocabulary words added to the students' word chains. To make sure that each student got a good understanding of the words and their definitions we did a sorting activity with visuals that represented each of the vocabulary words. It ended up taking the students less time than usual to match these pictures to the vocab words. Once they all were matched correctly we glued the visuals down so the students would have a word wall to reference during the rest of the lesson. Next, we engaged in a group discussion answering the compelling question: How does advocacy for social justice positively impact the lives of others? As the students were engaging with one another to come up with answers for this question Miss. Karlie and I decided to write down the students' thoughts on a poster board. The group discussion on this compelling question went in depth and there was a lot of insight to add onto the poster. At this point of the lesson the students deserved a brain break so we gathered the students on the rug in the front of the classroom to play a game of Simon says. After about 3 minutes of playing Simon says we went back to our table to read an informational book about Louis Braille and his story. Miss. Karlie and I took turns reading the book to the students and stopped along the way to ask them comprehension questions. After the read aloud we gave the students an arts and crafts activity to complete based on the invention that Louis Braille did in the past. Just like Louis we had the students advocate for the blind by creating one word out of rhinestones to make their own braille. The students really enjoyed this activity and it went just as Miss. Karlie and I had imagined. After the arts and craft activity we did a brain break where the students asked one another would you rather questions that required movement as answer indicators. To wrap up this lesson, we gave the students their post assessment to see the progress of their learning since lesson one.

The entire lesson went very well and the students stayed engaged the entire time. The activity that I believe went the best was the braille, the students showed a great amount of interest. Timing was something that was a weakness. Miss. Karlie and I created a poster board with cause and effect sentence strips to highlight important problems going on in France. This activity was supposed to come before the post assessment but because of the time we had remaining we prioritized the assessment instead and didn't get to the cause and effect. Each of the six students exceeded the lesson objective which was emphasizing with people that rely on an alternative way of communicating by using the braille alphabet. All of the students were able to create a word and notice that they are advocating for the blind.

As a teacher candidate a lot was learned from not only this individual lesson but the series of the six lessons. Keeping the students engaged and giving them brain breaks as needed helps keep the engagement of the students throughout the entire lesson consistent. This experience will influence my professional identity by giving me more experience and stretching my knowledge on teaching social studies. As far as planning and teaching, I will continue to always include visuals for the students when needed. The visuals from each of the six lessons helped by giving the students a reference to their learning. The experience gained from each of these lessons will forever influence my future educator career.

Book Read: A Picture Book Of Louis Braille written by David A. Adler 






















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