✓ Ask them the following questions:

▪ What do you think this is?

▪ What do you see when you turn the object around?

▪ How do you think that relates to magnets? (How do you think that works?)

✓ To tell students that today’s experiment will help them to understand how the compass works.
Areas for Improvement: I suppose I could give the students a little more time to explore the compass as it is not often they get to see one. This would help them to become more interested in the following experiment they will be doing because they would understand that what they learn is for tangible and practical objects such as the compass.

Lesson development: Experiment A and B Briefing
Time: 10 min
Purpose: Provide clear explanation and instructions

✓ Prompt the students: When we do experiments, what do we look at first?

✓ Unpack vocabulary: resting position, freely, suspended. May pick students tell the class the meaning of these terms.

✓ Go through with the students the instructions of the workbook. To ask the students the reasoning behind certain procedures. To answer student’s queries about the experiment if any.

✓ Teacher to guide them on what to observe (To observe where the North pole/ South pole of the magnet face, what do you think that means)

✓ While one person is doing the experiment, the rest will observe. Take turns.

✓ Lay down ground rules

Areas for improvement: This is a part where I gave direct instruction before the experiment start. To improve on this, I could involve the students more. For example, I can ask them “What do you think you should look out for?” instead of telling them straightaway. Also, I think it would be better if I could summarise the briefing to make it clearer for the students. This is because there are students contributing their answers to the class and in case they are not clear, I have to rephrase it for the class so that they could understand and not be off-task during the briefing or the experiment.

Lesson development: Experiment Procedure
Time: 15 min
Purpose: encouraging learner engagement, facilitating collaborative learning

1. Front groups take the hanging magnet set-up, back groups take the floating magnet set up.

2. Each group to have a maximum of 7 minutes.

3. Students to follow the procedure.

4. Answers will not be given at this point. The students will observe and record their observations in the workbook first (Part A Q6, Part B Q3)

5. The most well-behaved student will be the one who bring the set-up to the other group.

6. Repeat steps 2 and 3.
Areas for improvement: In this part of the lesson, it seemed like a concept attainment approach where the students have some idea of the concept to be taught as I did mention to them to look our for where the magnet rests. The students were quite engaged in this part because they get to explore the experimental set-ups on their own and were able to make some interesting observations.

Lesson Development: Workbook Activity 1.5
Time: 15 min
Purpose: Using questions to deepen learning 

✓ To go through with the students the questions they were supposed to answer in their workbook.

✓ Ask them to show answers on their little whiteboards to see what they observed.

✓ Ask students with different answers to explain

✓ Bring back the compass (link new knowledge to prior knowledge):

▪ Ask students: does it face the same direction? Students to show answers on their little whiteboard (Yes)

▪ Pick a student to explain

▪ Pick students to draw resting positions of the compass and the two bar magnets.

▪ Teacher to model labelling.

✓ Conclusion: All the freely suspending magnets should face the same way, which is the North-South direction.
Teacher to guide students to explain why it is North-South direction.
Areas for improvement: This is the part where I guide the students to link their new concepts to prior knowledge about the compass. I think I was not skilled at scaffolding the questions for the students so my questions could have lead to some confusion or digression from the main topic. Hence, I should prepare more guiding questions beforehand . Also, I should provide more opportunities for more students to explain instead of answering close-ended questions as it does not really show their understanding.

Post-Activity: Parking lot
Time: 5 min
Purpose: concluding the lesson

✓ Students to write down on the Post-it

a. One thing they have learnt today

b. One thing they still want to know 

✓ Paste on the notice board behind
Areas for improvement: Some students may have forgotten what was the lesson objective by this point. I should have brought the lesson objective up again during the conclusion so that they would explicitly know what they learnt from the experiments.

 

B) can integrate learning by drawing similarities of the bare-infinitive verb form with other forms of the verb like the present tense form but without the singular/plural suffix 

 

Teacher set questions related to numbers to 40. For example, writing the word form on the board and pupils have to write the numeral in their mini-whiteboard. 

Introduction:

Teacher begins the lesson with a scenario/problem. 

Concept Development: 

Pupils work in their groups to discuss and reason out their explanations. 

After discussion, teacher gathers pupils back to the floor to facilitate discussion. 

Lesson Consolidation: 

Pupils to complete activity sheet on place value as a group. 

Reflection: 
- Even though lesson objectives are not conveyed at the start of the lesson, I feel that it is acceptable as the teacher may want pupils to discover the concept themselves through solving the problem. 
- I would print the concrete materials (like a laminated printout of cake and candles) to help pupils visualise the problem  
- I would get pupils to write or draw their reasonings at the bottom of the task sheet to better understand what was the concept they used to solve the problem
- I would give examples and non-examples to check if students really understood the concept of place values (ones and tens)

Readiness:
Teacher to share the following scenario:

Teacher to tell students that by end of lesson they should be able to answer how John knew his exact distance ran.

Introduce to the students the definition of perimeter: The distance around the figure.

To give students activity worksheets with 1-cm grid squares that has outlines of the alphabets on them, and teach students how to count the sides of the squares around the figure to determine the perimeter.

Through getting students to share their answers, highlight that different shapes can have the same perimeter, and to link it to how knowing the perimeter of a shape is useful to understand how much space to allocate for a task or object.

Engagement:
Teacher to communicate lesson objective to find the perimeter of any shape.

Using activities from the activity book,
I DO: Teacher to guide students in using grid square to trace perimeter using their fingers. To teach methods of calculating perimeter (individually counting the sides, then adding it up. to highlight that they are not to count the squares, but rather the sides)

WE DO: Students to attempt a few questions on their own. Teacher to introduce algorithms to calculate perimeter of square and rectangle. Get students to do think-pair-share for an activity on two shapes formed by strings, where they have to hypothesize if they  have the same perimeter, and how they can check this. (provide actual strings for them to trace around the printed shapes)

Mastery:
YOU DO: Students to attempt activities in their workbook on their own.

Consolidation:

Areas of Improvement:
Overall I received feedback that this was a very teacher-led class, with minimal interaction with students. Although I had planned for some activities where they could interact in pairs and think, I did not have sufficient time as I did not realise that perimeter was quite an abstract concept for them to grasp (my class was a predominantly LA class). They had a lot of trouble with the grid squares, and did not understand how to count the perimeter using the sides of the squares. I could have spent more time on making my instructions clearer, and planning more activities revolving around counting with the grid squares to scaffold my students into better understanding the concept. Perhaps I could also let go more, and plan for group activities instead of pair activities to engage my students more.

Drawing upon LESSON ENACTMENT, I think I have used the Direct Instruction model in my lesson plan, which fits as this is a Mathematics Lesson, and the structured-ness of how this Math concept is taught, utilises elements of the Direct Instruction model very well. However, considering that my class had trouble with grasping the first few concepts of the grid square and how to calculate the perimeter from it, I could change the lesson enactment approach to one of Direct Presentation, to ensure that they can fully internalise the concept. This approach would work as they have no prior knowledge of the concept of perimeter

1. Provide possible plot predictions of a story

2. Identify the faults of ‘wrong’ comprehension answers

3. Substantiate their answers for True/False questions

 

1. Tuning In: Introducing what ‘whitewater’ is with a picture.

2. Understanding the Text: Going through each paragraph and posing questions to the students. Questions such as ‘Have any of you been in such a dangerous situation or witnessed one?’ and ‘What do you think happened before this? Why were they in a raft?’ 

3. Activity: In pairs, student had to complete a worksheet. The worksheet featured a list of ‘wrong’ comprehension answers. Students had to explain the fault and rectify it. An example was shown in class.

4. Consolidation: Summary of the story and students had to predict what happened in the end. 

5. Homework: Actual Comprehension worksheet

 

Encouraging learner engagement: Initially, I thought engaging them with questions would arouse some interest in the text. However, I realised that not all my kids weren’t excited about the text to begin with. Asking too many questions also posed the danger of questioning fatigue. Moreover, I realised that I had ambitiously set out to finish too much in an hour, so I did not have wait time for students to answer the questions. The pair activity had little consideration for students’ level of progress. (No differentiated instruction)

Using the concept attainment approach: Admittedly, the worksheet I created was quite tough for P3 students. They had difficulty understanding the requirements or explaining the faults of the questions. I only gave one example in class and assumed that the kids would have gotten it. I should have introduced a few more examples or non-examples (‘wrong answers’) to the class and have them identify if it was correct or wrong. Only if they were able to identify, would we then move on to reason why the answer was correct or wrong.

Enhancement for lesson enactment:
Although the lesson objective is to learn the new vocabulary words, the middle section of the lesson plan above seems geared more towards speech or pronunciation of the words instead. The teacher could guide the students using the “think through, interpret, evaluate & respond to text” method.
For example, the teacher could say a particular vocabulary word & ask the students what they understood of that word. Following that, to prompt them to recall where they have heard that word before (hopefully some students will mention the Stellar big book) and how the word was used there.

By the end of the lesson, pupils should be able to:

 

1.        Annotate a comprehension text for better understanding independently (Assessed from future comprehension exercises)

2.     Make inferences based on clues in the comprehension text independently (Assessed from answers to the comprehension text)

Main lesson (20 mins) 

 

·       Discuss comprehension with students by doing deep annotation of the text  

 

·       Deep annotation: 3 types of questions 

-  A: What does this remind you of? (activate prior knowledge)

-  B: What is your opinion on this? (I feel that …/ I think that…) 

- C: ‘Why’ questioning (Why do you think…) 

·       Examples of questions: 

 

- A: “It was a miserable and lonely bird.” – What does this remind you of? (e.g. Willy and Hugh) 

 

- B: “a very special bird that could understand the language of the people and speak their language too” – Complete the sentence: I feel that the bird is ___________. (e.g. smart/intelligent) 

- C: “he saw his pigeon lying dead in its cage, so he opened the cage, took out the pigeon, and threw it away…” – Why do you think Mr Chung threw the bird away? (e.g. he thought the pigeon died and therefore was no longer useful for him)

 

Improvements in lesson enactment:

Could have enhanced the following areas:

-          Encouraging learner engagement 

-          Facilitating collaborative learning 

 
1) Instead of always giving students the blank to fill e.g. (” – Complete the sentence: I feel that the bird is ___________. (e.g. smart/intelligent), I could have gradually allowed them to try annotating the passage themselves so that they have more opportunities to do independent work. I could have also broken the students up into groups to facilitate collaborative annotation of the comprehension passage. 

2) I could have concluded the task by asking students how they came up with their annotations and then responding according to their responses 
e.g. How did you decide which part of the text to annotate? What kind of questions did you decide to answer? 

 

Lesson Enactment:
Tuning In: Students will assess the prior knowledge that the students have to look at an analogue clock and pen down their observation. They will then share about what they have seen. Through this activity the teacher can assess their understanding about the hour and minute hands as well as the conversion between hour and minute.

Main Activity: Students will be exposed to the seconds hand on the clock. The teacher will then introduce that 1 minute is equal to 60 seconds, similar to the conversion between hour and minute. Teacher will then have an activity with the students to help them estimate seconds by watching a video on a 100m race. Students will then do a pair activity from a list of activities with a stopwatch and identify whether the activity is more, equal or less than 1 second.
Challenge Activity: Students will be challenged to find out how many seconds there are in a day with the knowledge of: 

Closure:

Areas for improvement: There might be too much Object Based Learning and too little direct teaching especially when it comes to the new concept of seconds. Learn to balance the direct approach and concept attainment.

- students should be able to make equal groups using concrete objects and count the total number of objects in the groups by repeated addition using language such as "2 groups of 5" and "2 fives"

- students should be able to understand multiplication in terms of equal groups

Lesson:
Development:

 teacher used magnets to concretely demonstrate idea of multiplication as grouping and went through the different languages of expressing the concept (e.g. 2 groups of 5, 2 fives, 5+5, 2x5)

- students were then split into pairs and given multilink cubes 

- teacher would write various multiplication equations (3 x 5) or phrases (3 fours) and students have to demonstrate with the cubes what the equation means (3 groups of 5 cubes each)

- they were encouraged to draw circles on their mini whiteboards to represent the groups
Consolidation:

- students were then assigned pages in their workbook

- for the tuning in activity, I could read a big book on multiplication so that students are introduced to the concept of multiplication

- I could have provided the students with plates to concretely demonstrate the idea of groups 

- There was a wide variety of learning profiles for the students. During the pairwork, I tried to support the weaker students by pairing them with pupils who were higher in ability. However, there was no differentiation for the students as the task was identical. It would be helpful to think about how to stretch the HA students, as well as to ensure that the LA and MA students understood the lesson instead of simply relying on their partner.

- It would be good to have some way of accessing individual mastery of the concept apart from the workbook.
Closure:
- There was no proper lesson closure. A short 5-min recap would be helpful for the students. Alternatively, can call on the students so they reflect and state what they have learnt