Below is a video of my teaching practice in action, along with the accompanying lesson plan.  This video shows a read aloud in my Kindergarten classroom.  The focus of this lesson was to introduce making connections while reading.  In the video, I model making connections by thinking "How does this book remind me of my life?"  After modeling this skill a few times, students then had the chance to practice making connections with a partner.  This video demonstrates my ability to manage students, introduce new content, and engage students in a variety of ways.

          Not only does this video highlight my teaching practice, but it also demonstrates many key strategies and concepts that I’ve learned about as a student in the Master’s of Education program at Michigan State University.  I concentrated on Literacy Education in this program and took many courses about supporting differences in literacy learners.  I also learned about best practices in teaching elementary reading.  In this video, I demonstrate my knowledge of important elementary comprehension strategies and show how I am able to model the strategy and then have the students practice independently.  In this program, I learned about the importance of read alouds and learned how to plan effective read aloud lessons, which is reflective in my lesson plan.

          This lesson also demonstrates my ability to accommodate for all of the differences in my literacy learners, including accommodating for my English Language Learners (ELL).   Throughout the lesson, I implemented many engagement strategies, like turn and talks, which are used to support language learners.   Additionally, I used props, anchor charts, and sentence stems as scaffolds to accommodate for all of my students.  This lesson is truly a compilation of best practices in reading instruction as well as best practices in ELL instruction.  The video, along with the lesson plan, clearly highlights my teaching ability as well as demonstrates what I have learned as a Master’s student.