Aileen Moore

EDUC 359

November 26,2017

Live lesson reflection

My group presented our SIOP lesson on November 17th. Our lesson was a secondary level

English lesson with a focus on theatre arts. The lesson was broken into a centers format with

three different centers. The centers were Tragedy vs. Comedy, Protagonist and Antagonist, and

how to create a Soliloquy or monologue which was my center. Our objectives were that students

will analyze phonetic patterns of vocabulary words. The second objective is that students will

define provided vocabulary words. I believe that our lesson did a great job at achieving these

goals through breaking down the words into their origins, something I have never done when

creating a lesson for the early/primary level. Our assessments also confirmed that the student

understood the vocabulary appropriately and adequately.

I feel as though the students vocabulary and language development was challenged as all of

the teachers used unique means to explain the vocabulary portions of their centers. We used the

origins of each word and broke them down by the syllable. This is never something Ive done

while making lesson plans for early and primary grades, as origin words, antonyms, and

synonyms would be too advanced for grades Pre-K up to fourth grade. For high school however,

I think the multiple options provided challenge and a multifaceted approach to learning new

terminology and expanding language development. For my personal center, I gave the

similarities and differences between my two words soliloquy and monologue, which is a direct
correlation to the students language development. The proper identification between the two was

crucial to what my center meant as a whole.

There was definitely parts of the lesson that I believed were too easy and too difficult. In the

first center, comedy and tragedy, the activity was slightly geared towards a younger audience.

However, it was effective in proving both tragedies and comedies. The worksheet where the

student was asked to identify different comedies and tragedies proved to be more difficult than

initially presumed. Our student did not know some of the movies as they were from movies the

student had never seen before. This could not have been predicted before the student was in the

classroom. For my center, the student was required to create their own monologue on a pre-

determined topic. I did not predict the level of difficulty but then accommodated and gave my

own example of a monologue to get the student started. This proved to be effective, but the

student found their groove after some prompting. If I was to ever do this again, I would heavily

emphasize the lack of dialogue in a soliloquy and encourage the student not to feel like it has to

be rehearsed rather just express internal thoughts on the topic out loud. This didnt turn out

completely how I wanted in the lesson, but I would use it again as it is an effective way to teach

monologue and soliloquy. I would adjust accordingly and provide more examples for the student.

The changes I would make for an actual ELL student would be subtle yet effective. I would

not change the activities for both comedy/tragedy and for protagonist/antagonist. Both were

visual activities and had universally known subjects. For my center, I would give a mad libs

type of prompt to the student. The prompt would have parts of a general monologue already

typed, and the student would add in the words that were relevant to their chosen topic. The

teacher would also read the monologue with the student and give the student the option to speak
it out loud. The teacher would also have increased use of visuals for the student to refer to, as

well as using the I, we, you method when introducing the words.

Overall, I enjoyed this experience teaching through centers. I thought all three teachers fed off

of one anothers work well and created unique activities. I also thought the topic of theater art

words was very engaging and could be expanded over numerous days. I would hope to do

something similar to this in my own classroom!