Friday, April 20, 2012

Final Blog Post-mini lesson reflection


I only worked with one focus student for my mini lesson because I wanted to be able to provide him with a great deal of support. My student is in the first grade and he is struggling with his fluency. His strengths are that he does not get discouraged or frustrated while he is reading, he just keeps powering through, decoding each word slowly. He is a really hyper boy who cannot sit still but for some reason this does not translate over to his reading. For every other subject he has a very difficult time sitting still and staying on task, but he can sit down with a book and read through the whole thing without even thinking about something else. His challenges are that he is slow at decoding the words so he loses comprehension of the text. He is also learning to read in two different languages simultaneously so he experiences a lot of language interference. When he is reading in English he pronounces the individual letters as if they were Spanish, and vice versa. This is one of the things that led me to wanting to work with him. He is very focused on determined on his reading he just needs a little extra support, which he does not get from my MT. I have been working with him during reading for the past two weeks to get to know him better as a reader and a learner. I have also been asking him questions about the books that he has been reading to find out more about his interests of reading. For my lesson I really wanted to focus on fluency. I wanted my student to be able to hear what fluent reading sounds like and also get practice reading fluently. For this reason I chose to work with a text that he was already familiar with. The second main thing that I wanted to focus on was voice inflection when reading dialogue within a story. The lesson went really well. He really picked up on my inflection while listening to me read and that really transferred over to his reading. He also did a really good job working with the dialogue. He got really into it and we ended up acting out a few of the interactions. He said too, that he liked doing the different voices for the characters because it was more fun that way. This is exactly what I wanted him to notice. I really wanted him to see that how you read the parts affects how you interpret the story. If I had to teach this lesson again I may try doing a bit more of an introduction, to stress the importance of fluency. I think that it worked really well to use a story that the student was familiar with because then he wasn’t too focused on decoding, so this is something that I would keep the same. If I were to teach a follow-up lesson with this student I would move into a book that he wasn’t as familiar with but still start out reading it through together

Grade: First
Mini-Lesson

Rationale (Why are you teaching this lesson?): I decided to work with one student, David, for this mini-lesson. I am doing this because I feel like he needs a little more one on one structured practice with his reading in order to improve his fluency. Right now he is working very hard to decode each word that he reads so he is not reading very fluently, which is also really affecting his comprehension of the text. We are reading in Spanish so I wanted to use a story that he is already somewhat familiar with so we read Caperucita Roja (Little Red Riding Hood).


Objective for this lesson: Student will be able to…
Read along with the teacher keeping up with the pace set by the teacher. Read dialogue using different voice inflection than used during other parts of the story.

Materials & supplies needed:
Caperucita Roja (book)

Procedures and approximate time allocated for each event 

Introduction to the lesson  (__2_ minutes) 
Tell David that becoming a good reader takes lots of practice and that when good readers are reading they sound like they are talking. They don’t read too slow, or too fast, and use the right kind of voice for different types of sentences. This is a book that David really likes and has read before so I think this will help make him motivated. I am also going to be reading along with him and he really likes one on one attention so I think he will be engaged for this reason.




OUTLINE of key events during the lesson  (_20__ minutes)
For the first half of the book I want David to be able to hear what a fluent reader sounds like. I plan on reading a line and then have him read the same line right after me. I am hoping that he will start to pick up on my reading patterns. Then for the second half of the book I want to allow him to be a bit freer so we will switch to alternating pages. I’ll read a page then he’ll read a page.

There is a lot of dialogue in this story so when we first encounter it I really want to point this out and demonstrate what reading dialogue should sound like. Emphasize that the words in the quotation marks are what the character is saying so we should try and sound like that person. Then we switch back to normal reading voice when we say “said little red riding hood.” I will pick out a few of the longer dialogues that take place and have me be one of the characters while David is the other. Then we will read aloud, but it will sound like a conversation. I am really going to draw his attention to how natural the conversation should sound and how our reading should sound like that too.



Closing summary for the lesson (__5_ minutes)

When we finish the story I am going to ask David to retell some of the main events and key details that we read. I am going to ask David if the story was easier to read because he was already a little familiar with it. At this point I want him to say that he was able to read quicker because he already had an idea of the words he was reading. Then tell him that once he becomes familiar with more words, he will be able to read more fluently, and that he just needs to keep practicing like we were today.


Assessment:
There really isn’t a set assessment for this type of fluency lesson, I will need to just be paying attention to how David is reading and take note of that when thinking about planning a follow-up lesson. I am looking to see if his fluency improves as he progresses through the book and as we practice reading the dialogue together, acting it out a bit.


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