Fourth Lesson 3/20

For this lesson, we once again split into our two groups to complete our stories. Marianne brought in some ribbon as a tool to help resolve problems from the stories, or 'tie up the loose ends'. We split into our groups and reviewed what we had written the week before. I have been having the students read as a group at the beginning of the lesson to review and get them thinking. It is also helpful for students who missed a part of the class due to a pull-out. I am still a little bit confused about how to handle this issue, as it seems I am almost always missing someone from my group for a pullout. I have generally been asking the others in the group to fill in the student. The reading aloud also helps. I have been trying to give a quick overview of what we are studying as well during that lesson to bring them up to speed, but it is difficult.
As we read during this lesson, I taped a piece of ribbon on all of the problems we developed in the first two parts of the story. Students then brainstormed ways to tie up all of those problems and make sure they were resolved. They did a good job of ensuring that we resolved problems, although occasionally a student would want to add in a whole new problem or storyline as we were finishing. I used this time to let students know that they would be able to work on their own stories later and can hold on to their ideas. This seemed to be okay with them.
This lesson was actually relatively short, since there is less development in this part of the story. I think this was good for the students because they had been sitting for quite a while throughout the morning.
I am wondering whether there was another method we could have used to teach a couple of these lessons. I really liked using the group model, but am wondering if there was another type of lesson we could have tied in to mix up the format for the students. I think that this model worked well for the lessons we planned, and I think time constraints could have caused problems, but am determining whether something else might have worked also.