Dakota State University

College of Education

Name: Miss Sorsen

Grade Level: 3-8
School: Rustic Acres Colony
Date: March 20, 2017
Time: 1:00-1:30 pm

Reflection from prior lesson: Some students struggled yesterday with knowing what details to include under their
headings. We discussed what both important and unimportant details entail. Also, one student did not have nearly
enough information in his outline. He will be allowed to continue his outline today, as writing is a subjective
process, and should not be uniform across students, especially across such a wide array of grades.

4.W.7 Conduct short research projects that build knowledge through

Lesson Goal(s) / Standards:
investigation of different aspects of a topic.
Lesson Objectives: Provided an example, students will construct their introductions with 100% accuracy.

Materials Needed:

-Notebook paper
-Notes about topic
-Outlines of topic
-Pencils
-Encyclopedias

Contextual Factors/ Learner Characteristics: Each student at Rustic Acres is an ESL student. There are 9 students in
grades 3-8. There are 7 boys and 2 girls. There are no students on formal IEPS. However, there is one student who
has to move around in order to concentrate he is permitted to do this to a certain extent.

A. The Lesson

1. Introduction (10 minutes)

getting attention Teacher will be looking out window. Holy cow, there is a cow in the middle of the
driveway. Students may or may not believe teacher. There really wasnt, but did I grab your
attention.
relating to past experience and/or knowledge You start books every week. The first page is
sometimes the most importance, because thats usually where you decide to keep reading or not.
creating a need to know In an introduction of a research paper, the writer should grab the readers
attention, tell them about what they are going to write and state your topic sentence.
sharing objective, in general terms Today you will be writing introductions for your papers using
the three elements written on the board: attention, summarize and topic sentence.

2. Content Delivery (30 mins)

a. Modeling Teacher, with student input and participation, will construct example introduction using her
topic, notes and outline. She will walk students through each element of an introduction, and write
definition and example of each one next to her overall introduction.
 b. Independent student practice Students will construct own introductions. Teacher will walk around
and ensure that each student has all three elements of an introduction plugged into their papers.
B. Assessments Used
i. Completed introductions
C. Differentiated Instruction
i. Teacher will walk step-by-step with how to write an introduction with students who are having difficulty
constructing theirs.

D. Resources
i. None.

Reflection: The students had written introductions before, but werent quite sure what to include in it. I think this
lesson helped to clear things up for them, as they now know the three things that must be included in an
introduction. They all did very well in incorporating all three elements. The part they most struggled with was
writing a topic sentence, so I stopped the lesson, and had a mini-lesson of how to write a topic sentence. This helped
to clear things up as well, and they were able to successfully complete their introductions.