Outcome

A combined total of 46% of the students failed to correctly "reshelve" the books and a total of 49% of the students correctly reshelved the the books. Approximately 5% of the students were absent during instruction. I explained that the second (and sometimes third letters) are used to organize the books when the first letter of the authors' names are the same. After instruction and review of the previous week's lesson approximately 93% of the students correctly "reshelved" the books with 5% experiencing further difficulty. 2% of the students were absent.

Reflection

I believe that my method of doing the timed pre-assessment of student retention of the previous lesson provided me with the insight needed to address student comprehension needs. By conducting the timed activity and asking the student questions, for whom the activity proved difficult, I was able to get a sense of the directives I need to give students when conducting this lesson in the future. In addition, I also learned that hands-on, manipulative activities (the students "reshelved" the mock books/spine labels by coloring and gluing them to the construction paper) are a great way to increase retention as students are actively engaged in the learning process. I would have liked to extend this activity further by giving students the names of authors that could be found under certain alphabets (i.e Carle, Cooper, Cronin) to see if the skills learned during this activity could be applied in real world scenarios. I learned that providing minimal instructions before scaffolding is an excellent way to gauge not only student comprehension of previous lessons, but the effectiveness of my instruction as well. When conducting lessons in the future that include activities that require students to access prior knowledge I will include a pre-assessment to determine whether or not the students are ready to move to the next skill.