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Robert Eisenhart Intro to ELL Professor Reilly 17 May 2013 ELL Reflection In choosing Jack for the live lesson it was the first time that I had the opportunity of teaching a student who was not at least in fifth grade. I chose to pick Jack to challenge myself and to leave my comfort zone which I know would also happen when I would teach an ELL student. Although I was nervous teaching out of my grade level, by the end of the lesson I found a new sense of confidence knowing I have the ability to teach students below my teaching area and still achieve positive results of learning. For the objectives of the lesson we wanted to teach Jack the process of the scientific method in a way that he could understand as a first grader. We focused our first objective of understanding and explaining vocabulary through writing and oral expression. Our next objective was for the student to use the vocabulary words in order to conduct their own experiment of objects that either sink or float. During the lesson Jack was able to create his own definitions and examples of the vocabulary and use the vocabulary to complete a version of the scientific method. The vocabulary chosen for the lesson was challenging for a first grade student to understand. Although they were difficult and at first Jack struggled through guidance he was able

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to understand the vocabulary and create his own definitions, examples, and apply the vocabulary correctly within his experiment. While the vocabulary and the objectives provided challenging material, I believe the experiment itself and the collection of data was fairly easy. Though, I believe this was acceptable because the aim of the lesson was for Jack to learn how to use the scientific method for an experiment. Since this initial concept was challenging, I feel the actual experiment should be kept fun and easy for the student to understand the concepts of the experiment more than challenge them with a difficult experiment. In order to modify this lesson for a basic ELL student I believe that the sentence writing should be replaced by oral and visual expression for understanding vocabulary. The experiment itself is easy enough for the student to complete as well as the data collection. Another way to modify the lesson would be to create more visual representations of the vocabulary in order for the student to achieve a better understanding of what the word means as well as provide actual examples that they would understand. Overall I feel the lesson went fairly well. Jack seemed engaged through the whole lesson and was able to demonstrate to our group what he had learned through our lesson.I do believe if we created the same lesson without an experiment that was relative to Jacks interests he might have felt a little more overwhelmed. Since we used an experiment with things he was familiar with I believe he was able to make better connections of the material he was learning.