Second lesson 3/14

I was much happier with the way our second lesson ran. After the first lesson, we actually made a few changes to our following plans to keep the lessons brief and streamlined. For this lesson, we focused in on only one part of stories: the beginning. While we had planned to focus in more on the book Corduroy again, we decided to dive right into our small group lessons. We taught group interactive models, so after starting as a class, the class was split into two groups.
I worked with my group to review Corduroy briefly and to review the information that is generally included in the beginning of a story. We made a list of the parts. Rather than simply discussing that the beginning comes first, we included a writing element to the lesson. My group began to brainstorm what we normally find out in the beginning of a story, including the characters, setting, and an introduction to a problem. We thought of ideas for our own story, and as a group, the students dictated sentences to the beginning of their group story while I was the scribe.
It was nice to work with a smaller group of students because we could ensure that all students were contributing to the group. I did, however, begin to wonder about the best ways to work with a couple of the students. I worked with a child with Asperger's Syndrome. It was very difficult to keep his attention, so I found myself calling on him quite often to keep him engaged. I wonder whether there is a better way to handle this to ensure that I don't spend too much time with him and not enough with the other students. I have a second student who is also difficult to keep on task. I will talk to the teacher to see how she works with them specifically.
I think that the questioning I did of the students was good during this lesson, and we were able to review what we did on Monday very well.
It seems that our story will be very interesting. The boys and girls seem to have very different ideas of the way the story should go. I am doing my best to compromise and include as many ideas as possible.