My Direct Instruction Lesson

My Direct Instruction Lesson:
On Tuesday, October 2nd, my science group and I presented our direct instruction lesson plan to the fourth grade class at Bishop Dunn. My group and I put a lot of time into preparing this lesson for the fourth graders. Prior to the lesson, we were all nervous. Prior to this experience, I never taught a whole class before. I began the lesson with the introduction. I was proud of my decision to grab the classes attention by saying "If you can hear my voice, touch your nose... if you can hear my voice, touch your chin... if you can hear my voice, touch your cheeks". The students enjoyed this and it successfully brought them together. I received compliments on this from a few of my classmates. After my group and I introduced ourselves to the students, I quickly reminded the students of our class rules. I explained to the students that they should hold up a thumbs up when they felt comfortable and confident with information, and that they should hold up a thumbs down if they felt confused or were not comfortable with the information. Next, I lead a review of the information the students learned over the past two weeks from the other college students. The review went well. Many students participated. All of the students showed understanding of previously learned material. This showed us that the college students that presented before us were successful. It also showed us that the transition from previous lessons into our lesson would be a smooth one. Lastly, I introduced the topic of plant morphology to the class. I asked them if they had heard the term before or if they wanted to guess what it might mean. One student gave an impressive guess. He said he thought plant morphology was the study of how a plant grew and changed over time. I was very impressed with this guess. I then passed the lesson over to Miss Brown.
My Thoughts:
Overall, I was pleased with my groups presentation. I think that my group members and I did a great job for our first time teaching a lesson to an entire class. I was pleased with my voice projection and the way that I introduced the lesson. I think that the other members of my group did a great job feeding the information to the class.
Some Things I Would Change:
Dr. Smirnova had several critiques of our lesson. She suggested that we do not ask the students what they think something means before we introduce it. She also suggested that we ask students if they agree or disagree with something in a different way than we chose. Lastly, she suggested that we work on our closure activity; she told us that our closure activity was unclear and needed to be explained better.  My group and I will take all of these comments into consideration when teaching our inquiry lesson on Thursday and when teaching whole class in the future.