Teaching my Language Arts Lesson

Today I taught my Language Arts lesson to Mrs. Miller's first grade class. I taught my lesson on defining key vocabulary words that were essential to know in order to grasp a better meaning of the text. The short story these eight words came from was called "My Robot." The text identified the words to be discussed by highlighting them in yellow. My job, as a teacher, was to appropriately define the words and present them to the students in ways that engaged them in learning vocabulary knowledge. I used several methods in my teaching to convey the definitions of the words to the students.
I started out my lesson by introducing the words from the text that we would be focusing on. I created an interactive power point presentation in which the words were creatively displayed and defined on the smart board. I was able to stop as long as I needed to during the power point to discuss the definitions of each word with the class. I also included a vocabulary review at the end of the power point in which I had fill in the blank sentences for the students to come up to the smart board and fill in the correct word for each sentence. The students really like being able to write on the smart board! Mrs. Martin also really liked how my presentation looked when the kids wrote in the blanks. She said the colors in the background of the slides I used really helped to magnify the colors of the smart board pens the students used to fill in the blanks. If I could change anything about my power point, I might make it a little bit shorter because I could tell that some of the students were starting to get fidgety towards the end of the presentation.
Next, I had the students pull out their reading books that contained the "My Robot " story and I explained to them that I would ask students to raise their hands to read a page of the story aloud. I asked the students to focus on the key vocabulary words we discussed and were highlighted for them in the text as they read. At the end of the reading, I went over the review questions that are found at the back of the stories. I noticed that the students seemed to really comprehend what was going on in the story from the answers they gave me.
Then I had the students do a matching vocabulary worksheet that I created. The students had to connect the word with the correct definition by drawing a line to it. Some students found this challenging, but I had to encourage them to think about the words and their meanings . In order to give early finishers something to do after they completed the worksheet, I had purposely made the worksheet on an 11x17 piece of paper which I folded in half to look like a book. The worksheet was on the front cover, and then when students opened it up I asked them to draw a picture of a robot they would like to have and write a few sentences using the vocabulary words discussed to either describe or tell a story about their robots. The kids really seemed to get into this , and I was most impressed by those who used the vocabulary words we discussed in their descriptions and stories of their robots. I asked if anyone would like to share their Robot stories and pictures to the class. All of the students eagerly volunteered to share their stories in front of the class.
The last thing I did was to orally ask students to tell me what the words meant as I asked them what the words definitions were aloud. I recieved good responses from the students who answered my questions.
Overall, I think this lesson proved to be a successful one in that the students were actively engaged in learning about the vocabulary words and their meanings, along with seeing how they themselves could use them in their own writings.