[Teacher voiceover]

In today’s lesson, I basically looked at my students and noticed that all of these students, even though there are different reading levels, had a similar strategy that they were struggling with. And that was visualizing and using details from the text to support their thinking. I am incorporating technology into it to help the students through that visualization process.

I’ve taken an article about mummies called the “Mystery of the Tattooed Mummy” and I’ve taken all the pictures out of the article andput the pictures onto the PowerPoint slide that I’m going to show the kiddos later on after they’ve read the text and had a chance to discuss what it is that they visualized in their minds. We should get some good questions from them, and hopefully some surprise looks when they get to see how their visualizations connect to the pictures.

As far as visualization goes, I thought that that element of the lesson was very powerful. The kids definitely could turn and talk to one another about places in the text where they visualized what the mummy looked like. I know during the discussion they definitely talked about all the tattoos that they could see on her body, and then when the students got to see the PowerPoint of the pictures, their eyes just bugged out.

Another reason why I really liked using the technology in this lesson was because I was able to access so many different pieces of material instead of having it all scattered about on the desk and having kids get confused. That visual was perfect for them. The one part in the text where they had the globe show up I wanted them to be able to see where Peru was in conjunction of where they lived. I was anticipating before I created the lesson that they might say that mummies are found in Egypt, so I wanted to be prepared for that just in case.

I definitely think that with this group I want to continue to launch on their interest. They were very curious about mummies: how people are mummified, what happens to the skin of mummies, how do the tattoos remain? Do they remain on the skin or on the bones? So I think that that’s probably where I’d like to go next with this group, to find some things that would continue to build on this interest that they already have, continue with visualization with them. The other thing that I noticed when reflecting is that the text was a little bit longer than what I would have liked. So I think next time I’m going to try to find a text that’s shorter, which will allow more time for the discussion and less time as far as the reading goes. That’s where I would probably like to go next with these kiddos.