ELA TPE h

The candidate understands how to teach vocabulary acquisition and use, standard English conventions, and functions of language in various contexts.

What is this?

I used these slides and interactive notebook materials to teach a lesson about understanding setting in realistic fiction to 7th and 8th graders during my placement at PUC Elementary School. The slides, provided by Martina Cahill @TheHungryTeacher on TPT, share a definition for the term "setting" and examples of how it can affect the story being told. As I presented the slides, the students took notes in interactive notebook templates, shown above. Throughout the lecture, we discussed the concepts in relation to their independent reading books.

Why did I choose it?

I chose these lesson materials about the concept of setting because they helped students to build vocabulary and understand a basic convention of storytelling in ELA. The students knew the term "setting," but not at the level of complexity shared in the slides. I was able to answer their questions and clarify the concepts as we went along. It also contributed to their understanding of how language can function in certain contexts, because they analyzed ways the setting might have impacted the story in the independent reading books they had recently begun.

What did I learn?

When organizing and teaching this lesson, I learned how to make my thinking about my content more explicit. This was one of the first lessons I had ever taught which directly dealt with a concept in my content area, and it pushed me to be able to articulate thinking processes I find natural after so many years of studying English. The way the concept was broken down in the slides helped me to clearly share it with the students, and served as a model for me for distilling concepts and creating materials in future lessons.