Mentor Lesson Observation

Khulood Ali Life Cycles - 16 March, 2016

4A
Competency Area
Professionalism and Understanding
Professional growth
Planning for learning
Planning activities and lesson aims
Implementing and Managing Learning
Language and delivery
Classroom management
Communication skills
Monitoring and Assessment
Critical Reflection
Strengths of the lesson:

US

Lesson plan completed and sent in advance.

Pictures displayed on board, students asked what they can see. This is a good strategy as it
gets the students warmed-up for the lesson to come and also gives you important information
about what the students have remembered/already know, and reinforces vocabulary (adult/baby
animal names).
Love the bi-lingual vocab cards! And that you referred to these during the lesson and asked
students to read them (and provide definitions).
Your activities connected well to each other and to your LO.
The PPt presentation was clear and helped reinforce the learning so far.
You speak well, your voice is clear and at an appropriate volume, and the pronunciation of key
vocab was accurate.
Areas for development:
When you write on your lesson plan the teacher will ask questions, it is a good idea to write a
few examples of these questions to remind yourself (or another teacher using your plan) what
the focus is what is it that you want the students to think about?
The paper plate activity was fun, I liked that you asked them to repeat the instructions back to
you, however the instructions were very general draw a life cycle. How many steps did you
want? Do they need to draw arrows between the stages? Do they need a title? Should they label
the steps or just draw them? Should they use the whole plate? Should they colour it in? etc. (The
poster on the board had 5 stages, but up until then, you had only talked about 4 stages, so this
may have been a little confusing). Do you really want them to be faster than you? Or do you

want them to do their best work? If they have time to do their best work, the plates would make a
great display and learning resource.
General Comments:
As a class, you first looked at adult and baby animals such as cats and sheep, and you talked
about how they are different (size). There is quite a big jump between cats and kittens and
butterflies and caterpillars you may have needed to talk about how kittens look like small cats,
but some babies can look very different from their adult form.
I love brainpop!
The students might have needed the spelling of some words to be able to complete the first
section of the worksheet, there are some tricky new words here. You can always add extra
words in a word box here, so students still need to identify the correct words and cant simply
work it out by a process of elimination.
You seem to have developed a nice rapport with the students.
E = Excellent, G = Good, S = Satisfactory, M = Marginal and US = Unsatisfactory