one good lesson makes for a great day

In the middle of a four day sub job with no lesson plans- unexpected absence and illness- during CST testing I decided to take a little control and do a lesson based on where the kids were in their anthology and Language Arts when I stepped in. We had read a story called Thunder Cakes in their anthology (great story by Patricia Pollacco who I love) on Monday and not done much to follow up on it. When I looked through the Houghton Mifflin teacher's guide and the practice book it emphasized the words with an -ed and an -ing ending. Short mini lesson in their book about the rules surrounding this. I had the kids do a second reading working in pairs and try and find as many -ed and ing- word endings as they could in the text. One partner was the secretary and the other student spelled the word from the text to the person writing. OMG- we worked steady for about  30-40 minutes before we were done and had a list of 53 ed words and 7 ing words from the text itself.  All the rules were represented by the text and there were some beautiful new vocabulary words like glistening and cooing. I LOVE seeing students engaged and having fun and learning without trying. I felt so successful and when we did the compiled list on the board and talked about the different rules the kid's volunteered their own examples of the rules. I cannot describe how quickly and seamlessly it all flowed. I assigned a practice book page that would have taken me twice as long to explain as do following this "exercise" and they blasted through- no explanation necessary because they had already done it in a REAL text. so gratifying.

Now the rest of the day was a little more challenging, but I try and remind myself this is my first year, not my classroom, and I HAD SUCCESS0 keep the focus on that. How did I get it? BY being prepared and setting a clear objective.