The three lessons that I turned in were based on three different days from a genre unit. This genre unit revolved around the book Guests by Michael Dorris, and covered a variety of different topics including; genres, reading strategies, vocabulary, retelling, etc. The three days that I chose to turn in mainly focused on similes/metaphors, personification, and comparing character traits. I think that overall my students were able to recognize and produce their own similes and metaphors, but some simply failed to follow the directions to the postcard that they had to create that included sim/met. Where some of my students did struggle a bit more, was recognizing and pulling out personification from the text that they were reading. Many of them were pulling out metaphors and similes rather than personification, even though we clarified the difference before sending them off to complete the activity. This is not the first time that they have been introduced to personification, but I think that since the two lessons were taught side by side, it may have made things more difficult to separate the differences. Overall though, there weren’t any students who got all of their examples wrong, therefore I feel that they are at least beginning to grasp the concept. The assignment also called for them to create two examples of personification on their own, and some students struggled with this as well. Since I feel as though many of the students are just falling short of complete understanding, I plan to just keep bringing it up throughout other lessons and have students recognize what a particular piece of text is a simile, metaphor, or personification, and then have them tell me how they know this; along with this require the use of these in various writing pieces.
If I were to teach the simile and metaphor lesson again, I would have actual postcards that I have received in order to show them the structure of how a postcard is put together, along with some of the types of things that are said in a postcard. I would also have created a postcard based on their requirements as an example of what is expected, in order for them to have yet another visual. Something that I would have changed in the personification lesson would have been more of an emphasis on the differences between that and similes/metaphors. I think that I might have created a checklist of questions to ask themselves before writing down what they thought was an example of personification.
The third lesson was less related to the previous two, and asked students to pay attention to the differences between the two main characters in the story. Before we read the chapter from the text for that day, I had prompted students to start listening for the traits each character had, and the differences/similarities between them. Students used a Venn Diagram to organize what they were able to come up with, and were assigned one of the three sections to focus on; we came together at the end to fill in the rest of it as a class. Many of the things that the students came up with were very “shallow”; for example clothes, boy/girl, different tribes etc. Though some of these were relevant, many of them struggled to give me what was different about these traits and why they were important. I had to do a lot of probing and questioning to get some of the answers that I was expecting from them, and yet still some of them had a difficult time pulling this information from the text. This is something that they struggle with as a class overall. They are able to pull the surface details to support their ideas, but really have a hard time delving deeper into the text to find the real meaning/idea/reason.
I think that next time I might have them complete as much of the entire Venn Diagram rather than separating it by groups to focus on one area. Some of them neglected to think whether or not the traits that they were listed applied to only that character or both. As far as addressing the fact that they weren’t able to dig deeper into the text, I think that this is something that needs to be addressed
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