For my reading lessons, I am
planning on focusing on some skills I know my students will understand how to
use, but may not be fully developed yet. The students I plan to work with are
of varying levels of reading proficiency. I would like to work with one student
(student 1) that I know struggles with reading but enjoys it and the other
student (student 2) is a great reader but is not the most confident. Student 1
is a confident young man who does decently well in school but does all that he
can to avoid schoolwork. I have noticed that he sometimes spends all of math
time in the bathroom. When it comes to reading, he knows his sight words well,
but has a really hard time with larger words with strange sounds in them. He
will attempt a word and then while not looking at the word itself, he will make
random guesses as to what the word is. Student 2 is a good student but is
pretty constantly distracted and doesn’t focus well. This has affected her
reading because she does not focus well when she is reading and she tends to have
pretty poor fluency, although she does know the words she is reading.
Because
these students are different, it is hard to figure out what lessons would be
beneficial to both of them. From what I have seen, my students do not spend a
lot of time working with vocabulary besides the use of dictionaries. For this
reason, I would like to do more of a vocab lesson using a strategy similar to
that used in Winters article with word frames. I would read a short book with
my students and choose one word from that book to analyze. I think choosing a
word that my students are unfamiliar with and conducting the word frame as well
as doing some word associations with a bubble map would be helpful to them to
think of new words in a different way. This is something I think both of my students
are capable of and would help with their fluency. We can also break down the
phonemes of that specific word to help Student 1 learn more about how to break
down a word.
For
my other reading lesson, I am thinking of working on reading factors with my
students. Because they both enjoy reading, but it may not be the easiest thing
for them, I think working on things like predicting, connecting, questioning,
visualizing, etc, will continue to excite them about reading and help them
develop some reading strategies that will help them in the future. So, for this
lesson, I will choose either another book or the same book used for the
vocabulary lesson and work through the book, pausing to make predications, connections,
visualizations, etc to encourage them to do this while reading on their own. I
will try to explain the importance of all of these strategies to their learning
as well. Again, I think this would
be beneficial to both of my students because these are things they can both
work on even though they are at different reading levels.
After spending the last year in my first grade classroom, I have observed countless moments where my students entered a state of confusion when asked whether two words rhyme. This not only left me in a state of worry, but also made me question whether any rhyming activities had been reinforced since first grade. I realize that each teacher focuses on the standards that are pertinent to their particular grade, but I question whether we remember to reinforce the educational measures that students learned in the grade prior all the while meeting our own standards. Prior to creating these lessons I was not aware of which grade was responsible for instructing students on rhyming. As I began researching where rhyming is learned in the CCSS I found that rhyming is a Kindergarten standard. I then began thinking about the few times that we have ever focused on rhyming while I have been in the classroom, and I realized that my students have not experienced a great deal of reinforcement since last year.
ReplyDeleteTherefore, I found it to be of the utmost importance to reinforce rhyming in first grade so it can continue to be a foundational tool for my students to carry with them for the rest of their lives. In order to do this effectively and use a book in my lesson, I am looking to the ever-present Dr. Seuss to both engage my students in rhyming while also exhibiting many different rhyming patterns and suffixes in the process.
Another aspect that my students need work on is creating a sentence with basic sentence structure. I have only observed my students writing sentences three times since I began there in October. After talking to one of the parapro's and observing student's work in the hallways, I have found out that other first grade classrooms spend a great deal of time on sentence structure. The few times I have watched my students write sentences, they were unaware of using a capital letter, use spacing between words, and having end punctuation. Therefore, I too find this 100% necessary as sentence structure is one of the standards for first grade. I am going to incorporate the book "A Walk in the Park" from TE 348 to have my students write sentences to pictures that do have captions included.
For my final two mini lessons I am hoping to work with three students that fall into varying reading levels. I think this will be interesting and allow me to see what each student (given their different abilities) takes away from the lesson. All too often I hear from my students "what word is this?" and "what does this word mean." Although sometimes the words are difficult and they do have dictionaries at their desks to use, I (like Emily) would love to do a lesson that teaches the students a strategy to break down words as is done in Winter's article. I think this strategy could be very helpful for them given the fact that an adult and/or dictionary is not always going to be available. As far as the book and or reading I want to pull the word to break down from I am not completely sure yet. As of right now I am leaning toward a short online reading from scholastic that i think the students would find interesting.
ReplyDeleteFor my second lesson I was hoping to focus on the idea of writing a paragraph. My students have worked a lot on writing paragraphs, however, very few of them have completely grasped the concept of indenting, introduction sentence, at least three supporting details and a concluding sentence (capitals at the start of sentences and periods at the end). I feel like it would be helpful if we looked at various sample readings, some that are paragraphs and some that are not, and talk about each of them and why some are paragraphs and some are not. I feel like my students would really benefit from having an actual discussion about this as opposed to just being told about paragraphs constantly. I am not completely sure this is what I want to do, but it is a start.