Formal Observation: FRIENDS for life.

Last week I completed my second formal observation conducted by my FA.

While I was quite nervous before starting, once I started things seemed to start to flow nicely.

The beginning of the lesson we did a think-pair-share in regards to what we learned last week during our FRIENDS for life program. The kids were really engaged and participated to the best of their ability. I was great to see that they had remembered a lot of what we had spoken about the week before.

Next we completed an activity that involved the students answering questions about given scenarios, for example,

“A friend wasn’t invited to a birthday party”
–> How might he feel?
–> What can you do to help?

I have the students time to work on this assignment by themselves and then we debriefed their answers together as a group. One thing that was suggested to me by my FA was to have the students act out the scenarios and provide answers verbally rather than writing down all of the answers. I think that this is a great idea as it helps to make the learning more enactive and gets the students up and moving!

Next we did a similarities activity in which I grouped the students into 3 large groups and instructed them to come up with as many similarities as they can. This part of the lesson was a little bit of a nightmare as I discovered that I should have first grouped the students into smaller groups and second that I should have assigned roles (such as writer, question asker, task manager etc.).

Overall the lesson went fairly well and I learnt a lot about cooperative learning strategies and plan on attending some workshops in this area in the future!