The teacher leads a mutually respectful and collaborative class of actively engaged learners.
One place were student collaboration was evident in my classroom was during our morning grammar lessons. These started after our Morning Meeting and preceded Reader’s Workshop. The lesson I included as an example covered verbs, which the students had been practicing since the early days of the fall semester. The intent of the grammar lessons was to introduce new concepts as well as provide extra practice with material that they had already been taught. This ensured maximum understanding of the different components of the English language.
In this lesson, I emphasized Subject-Verb Agreement, which is a skill the students practiced during their Morning Work. I wrote the sentences on the anchor chart ahead of time to maximize the use of time during the lesson. I started the lesson with a review of Subject-Verb Agreement then read the first sentence. I asked the students what they noticed about it, which incited several of them to raise their hands and offer various answers. When we had these grammar lessons, students pointed out areas of grammar that we weren’t covering that day, such as the sentence starting with a capital letter and ending with a period, which was an indicator of their knowledge of those particular elements. During this lesson, I received similar answers to these before a student pointed out that the word “crawl” was a verb. I then underlined the word in the sentence. I repeated this pattern of asking the students for answers before underlining until every verb in the sentence was discovered. We did two sentences a day during these lessons, which meant we stuck with the same topic for a few days, and that offered a chance for extra practice with the students.
The Grand Adventure 