Reading Lessons Overview

-->

My first mini lesson will focus on using context clues to help determine what an unknown word means. The students have been working on this strategy and the students chosen for this mini lesson have been struggling with decoding and their fluency skills. Both of the focus students are English language learners and have English as their second language. Based on their work completed regarding this strategy both of these students struggled. I also had an opportunity to work with one of my focus students during a task that required students to complete a chart for words within the story they were reading about snakes. This assignment required them to first indicate what they think the word means based on context clues, write a definition in their own words and then use it in a sentence. Again the two focus students’ work indicated they could use more practice with this strategy. These students also receive extra support in reading and were recommended by my mentor teacher for this particular mini-lesson. I will be using the book, Thunderstorms by Chana Stiefel as there are several words that my two focus students may not be familiar with. These words include, evaporate, condense, molecules, explosion, vibrate/vibrations, tornadoes, destructive, hailstones, damage, meteorologists and forecasts. I will begin by talking about what decoding means, what context clues are and activate prior knowledge by discussing that they have already been working on this strategy in their reading about snakes and also while reading the book, Hatchet. I will then model how to use context clues for the word evaporate by re-reading the sentence before and after, noting that the text explicitly says what this word means and that the diagram also shows this process. Next, I will ask the students to help me discover what the word condenses means as the text does not explicitly state what this word means but the words in the sentence help explain and the diagram also provides a clear picture of this process. After, the students will read the book together and after reading each page (each page does not have more than 6-8 sentences) I will ask the students if there were any words they are unsure of. This may also be apparent when they are reading if they pause or work through decoding the word first. If they say no I may ask them to briefly tell me what they just read about. Also, I have some words listed above so even if they say they know what all of the words mean I will have specific ones picked out to make sure they are taking this seriously and using this strategy. Hopefully, the students are honest and can work through what the words mean together. While they will not always work collaboratively when reading, they were both born in Africa, have many similarities and can definitely benefit from hearing each other’s thoughts and ideas during this mini lesson. 

My second mini lesson will focus on comprehension and the two focus students will summarize the story using a story map.  My mentor teacher recommended one student because work collected demonstrates that when she tries to summarize she ends up copying what is explicitly said in the book instead of focusing on what happens in the beginning, middle, end or the main big ideas of the passage. For example, during their unit on Hatchet she had a very hard time re-telling what the chapter was about without spending time re-reading half of the chapter and trying to write way too much information on her worksheet. In the end, the information chosen to write about was irrelevant information that did not contribute to the main events taking place in that chapter. The other student also has a hard time comprehending and remembering what he read and the order of events that take place in the story. Using a story map that has the students focus on the main events will help them synthesize a story and also allow them to summarize what was read in a more meaningful way. Having students focus on a select number of main events (what they believe are the most important) will help them retell the story in a short and sweet manner. I will encourage them to think about this activity as if they were going to go home and tell someone what the book was about and what they would say. The students will hopefully have different summaries of the story being read as a summary of a text depends on the students interpretation of events, understanding of what is most important and both students will first write or draw their summary and then re-tell the story to each other and will be encouraged to include what they believe is the main idea!