First Lesson - Grade 3

 First Lesson: Grade 3

The next lesson that I taught was a grade 3 class in which I was introducing the topic of maps. Overall it was a pretty simple lesson and the class picked up on the vocabulary and ideas in the topic really easily so I found that the students were either finished really fast or getting bored really quickly. It was tricky to manage because of this but it worked out well in the end. 

I started off with moving the class to the carpet at the back of the room where I asked all of the students to sit in a circle before putting a map in the middle for everyone to see. It was the same map that they had in their textbooks so for those who couldn’t see, I asked to look at the books too. First, we went over the keywords in the textbook, rock, path, forest, car park, picnic area, bridge waterfall and river. To my surprise, they picked up on these really fast and were able to name all of the keywords really fast. But this made it easy to move on to the next activity.

As explained in the textbook, I played the square game with them, one person would call out a position (ex. B1) and another person had to give an answer of what the keyword was (ex. rock). I used a pen as a student tracker and each person had to pass it on to another one who would ask the question. The person who replied before would then name the position. So overall, everyone got the chance to ask and answer a question. It was at this point that the first issues arose. The students who weren’t asking or answering the question at a given moment would get distracted easily and talk among themselves, getting distracted away from the activity was really easy. In the end, I was able to re-engage everyone but it was difficult to keep everyone’s attention when someone else was talking. Maybe next time, mixing it up by choosing names at random (or letting the students choose) will be a better option as it will keep everyone’s attention on the activity. 

While still on the carpet, I asked the students to look at the map and find 2 more areas that need and don’t have symbols and to label them. They quickly realised that the playground and beach were missing names. I had a spare piece of paper and I asked students at random to draw a symbol on the paper for everyone else in the class to guess what the symbol was. I started off with a bilingual student who understood completely and the others were then able to do the next ones through the understanding. In the end, the students all made their own map with everything drawn out on a single piece of paper. They were able to make a map and name everything on it too.

I then asked everyone to go back to their tables where we moved on to the next, more individual activities. First, I asked them to fill in activities 5 and 6 in the textbooks as we had gone over them on the carpet, before moving on to their student books. While they were getting those out, I drew out a line similar to the one they had in their books, labelled them 1 through 7 and when everyone was ready, I picked students to name what location each one was. It went pretty smoothly and quickly. I had been asked by my mentor teacher to give activity 2 for homework so we went onto activity 3 where we looked at full sentence use of what was and wasn’t present in the picture. I modelled the first 3 sentences on the board to see if everyone understood the assignment. Most students did, but as I was monitoring, I realised that I may not have explained the work properly as some were struggling. I then pointed out the picture to the ones who were struggling and asked more specific questions, that seemed to work, it is something I should have done before the activity. 

By then it was the end of the lesson, the students showed me their answers in their student books and when they were finished, they could go on their break.