Practice only makes for improvement. Les Brown

So today I was able to do a little make up of my not so great science and social studies lessons. I'm trying to figure out how to manage group work and the transition from whole group to small group. It seems like this is one of those things you can't really learn from a lecture, but it takes a lot of practice (and patients). There are a lot of things you just don't think about when planning a lesson for the first time. Today I worked on talking to the class about what it looks like when you are in your small group. "What should I see, and what should I hear." I then had a few groups model what they should do first before releasing the whole group to work on their own. They had a guide to their learning and it told step-by-step what to do. I was very naive at first and really over estimated their abilities. So today I re-explained the questions and the format to the guide and asked if students had any more questions after. This seemed to really help. I see it right now as if I'm practicing how to manage the group before taking over. I see what works, what doesn't, and then expanding on what works.

Instead of going on to my next lesson in grammar I thought it would be more beneficial to go back over singular possessive nouns and have the students practice since this is an area that students get mixed up a lot in. (as well as adults). I feel like I repeated myself 100X when explaining that the 's shows that the (noun) owns something in the past few days but it seemed to really work and I only have about 2 students that missed a problem (mostly because they rushed through it). It shows the power of re-teaching and how students can benefit from hearing about a concept for more than one day. It seems like the curriculum doesn't allow a lot of time to really teach one particular area because we have to keep moving forward. But what then do you do if you have a few students or even a whole class that hasn't mastered the concept? Should you keep trudging along hoping that they will pick it up, for we are supposed to "believe in the spiral"? Or should we stop and try to mater the concept and move on to the next even though we may not have the time for it?