5. Educators implement effective practices in areas of planning, instruction, assessment, evaluation and reporting.

“Once upon a time…and they lived happily after ever” As I finished reading ‘Three Little Pigs’, I collected paper puppets and leaned forward to the students. “Did you like the story? What do you think of each pig and the wolf?” I asked them listening comprehension questions and open-ended questions which encouraged the students to make a personal connection to the story. During a noisy Think-Pair-Share time I circulated the classroom, carefully listened to students’ conversation, and assessed their listening comprehension.

Then I brought the students back together as a class and we talked about the story elements using a graphic organizer. As a follow-up activity, I invited students to act out the story in groups. They loved retelling the story through action and this was a good activity, which incorporated kinesthetic, verbal, interpersonal, and spatial intelligences.

At the end of the lesson, I took an anecdotal note on students’ general performance and comprehension of the story. I also wrote a list of student names who struggled in class and possible strategies to help these students. Keeping an anecdotal note really allowed me to stay informed of students’ progress and made the whole process of reporting during the final week of my practicum easier. In addition to the anecdotal notes on students’ participation and performance during discussion and drama, I used students’ writing journals and drawings to evaluate their growth throughout the fairy tale and folktale unit.

In the next lesson, I asked the students to retell the story of ‘Three Little Pigs’ using a ‘5-finger rule’ and then encourage them to draw and write a sequence of the story.

In planning the lesson on ‘Three Little Pigs’ I took Gardner’s Multiple Intelligence approach to the instruction and assessment of students’ knowledge and skills. I designed lesson that included a clear learning objective based on the curricular standards and my students’ interests. In terms of instruction, I employed a variety of strategies to give students opportunities to learn through multiple modes and demonstrate their knowledge and comprehension in multiple ways as well.

The use of a variety of instructional and assessment strategies in Language Arts lessons about ‘Three Little Pigs’ supports the fact that I met this standard.