Reflection: Best Practices In Early Childhood Education

In Class Lesson #2 Through teaching my two whole group comprehension lessons, I believe that I have gained a better understanding as to what the reality of being a teacher is like. I believe that as a teacher, I have devoted myself to lifelong learning and through completion of my first comprehension lesson, I designed and taught a second comprehension lesson that was built completely upon prior learning. With that being said, throughout this experience, I have come across many strengths and weaknesses that I have used to my advantage. To begin, in my first comprehension lesson that I taught on November 13th to 22 1st graders, I chose the content standards RL.1.2 – Retell stories, including key details, and demonstrate understanding of their central message or lesson and RL 1.3 – describe characters, setting, and major events in a story, using key detail. Students were previously introduced to the standard and I read a book that related to what they were already …show more content…
According to the article Developmentally appropriate curriculum: Best practices in early childhood education, “Developmentally appropriate practice is teaching that is attuned to children’s ages, experience, abilities, and interests, and that helps them attain challenging and achievable goals.” When choosing my standards for my second lesson plan, I knew that my students had an understanding of what a character is and the beginning, middle, and end of a story because of my first lesson. I believe this is important because in my second lesson, we talked about student feelings and how they can change from beginning, middle, and end. If students did not learn about this before my second lesson, it would have been developmentally inappropriate. Going along with this, I know that to practice developmental appropriation in the classroom, it is important to meet children where they are, as both individuals and as a