Birnkrant Lesson Plan Overviews

Lesson 1:

I will be working with two female students who both are fluent readers.  One of them is not where she is supposed to be fluency wise for her age, however she is very fluent while reading compared to her other classmates.  She does not need any special support while reading.  The other student is an ELL student, but happens to be one of the most fluent readers in the class.  She only needs help pronouncing words that she is unfamiliar with.  I chose to use these two students as my focus students, because I want to see if they are not only good readers, but if they can comprehend the text as well.  I have also seen my mentor teacher pair these two students together before for partner reads.  For the lesson I will be using a short story called "Kesha's Wish" that is from a set of comprehension cards that my mentor teacher has in her classroom.  The students will be answering teacher-generated questions at the end of the lesson for the assessment and each student will take turns reading during the story. 

Lesson 2:

The two focus students that I am going to be working with for this lesson are two ELL students.  One student is from Burma and prior to starting school at the elementary school this year, he did not know any English.  He has been working on learning sight words throughout the year and playing games online that help him practice identifying simple and frequent words.  The other student that I will work with is a refugee who is also from Burma who just started attending the school about two weeks ago.  Supposedly, he learned a little bit of English back home, but I have yet to hear him read.  I have read a few times with the first student and have noticed some progress.  However, he is still at the kindergarten reading level.  I decided to choose these two students because they both speak a minimal amount of English and I thought it would be interesting to observe as well as help them read a story together.

The students will read Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss with me.  I will read a sentence or phrase and then one student will repeat after me.  I will alternate reading phrases with each student.  I will also allow wait time to see if the students can identify and recognize words on their own and pronounce them to the best of their abilities.  I will have a point system to tally up how many words each student identifies and reads correctly during the assessment part of my lesson.  During the assessment, I will point to random words throughout the book and see if the student can read that word to me.

Lesson Reflections:

Both lessons went well!  There were some pros and cons, but I was able to improvise when needed.  For instance, for the second lesson I decided to be fairly lenient on assessing the students' pronunciations since it is hard to understand them sometimes with their native dialects.  Also, for the first lesson I had to define certain vocabulary words that I thought the students would probably already know in the passage.  I made sure that the students understood each of these new vocabulary words before proceeding with the lesson.  Overall, I think each lesson was a success and I am glad I had the opportunity to complete them! 

Final Self Assessment-Kassab

Overall both of my reading lessons went well. I think the students did gain at least some of the points of both of the objectives. I did this lesson as a whole class so there were more students that succeeded in the areas I wanted them to of semantics and comprehension. There are some areas that I see that I need to work on not only for the topic of language arts but as a teacher as a whole. I need to do a better job of facilitating the classroom and making sure that each student is on the same page. It got a little difficult when students are pulled aside for help rooms. I think my focus students did grow a little from both of the lessons. They both learned new descriptive vocabulary to use as well as comprehended two chapters in a book to reflect on onto a worksheet. My teacher gave me feedback and hopefully that will help for my future as a teacher on these types of lessons.

Peel Reading Lesson Overview

For a majority of this semester I have been doing a special reading program with 6 particular students that have the lowest reading levels of the class. Through this program, we divide them up into two groups and work individually with the groups for a half hour each everyday with the hopes of improving their reading skills all around.

With this being said, for my reading lessons I've decided I wanted to focus on 4 of these 6 students. With one group of 2  I would like to work on their phonemic awareness (chapter 5) and with the other group of 2 I would like to focus on their comprehension.

For the first group of students, I will refer to as Mat and Lisa, I know it's appropriate if I work on 'fluency' with them because as I observed them the past couple of weeks I've noticed they have difficulty breaking apart words, looking for patterns, identifying letter sequences, and identifying sounds in words.I have come up with some hand gestures to help them improve their phonemic awareness and I am hoping by using these gestures repetitively with the students that it will help build their phonemic knowledge. 
Vowel strategy sounds that I know they have difficulty with:
"u"- Umbrella, act like your lifting up and opening up an umbrella using hands
"i"- Run finger up throat and dot nose (formation of an i)
"o"-circular motion around mouth using finger
"ou"-OUch, Pinch arm while saying "OUch"

For the second group of kids, I will refer to as Julie and Cameron, I've decided to work on their comprehension skills (Stahl and Nuefeld). When these students were given their DRA they struggling with retelling events or main ideas that happened in the story. I've now realized when we work together in groups this is something we haven't been doing very often. It's almost as if the students seem to just be focusing on the words they are reading, rather than what the story entails.

Letter to parents

To the guardians of Cheyenne,

        I have been observing Cheyenne's reading lately and I have noticed some situations that need to be addressed with her performance and I have a solution. First of all, I've noticed a large struggle in her fluency, as she has a tendency to omit or substitute a lot of words while reading. Also when it comes to her decoding skills, I have noticed she struggles to identify multisyllabic words and consonant and vowel sounds. She has progressed a lot when it comes to her comprehension as I've noticed her being able to retell evens that happened during our reading and she has successfully been answering the follow-up questions I've been asking. Also, I would like to add I like how she uses a lot of expression while reading; she can differentiate between an exclamation point, question mark, and period, which is great!
       With all of this being said, I was wondering if you would allow me to place her into our literacy group that meets every day during reading time for 30 minutes?  Right now there is 7 students, divided into a group of 3 and a group of 4 that meet separately. During this half hour time period we focus and work on all off the topics (issues for Cheyenne) that I listed above. We read at least three books together each week, based on their reading levels, and we use these books as references to improve our skills. To improve her fluency this would help because the students first read the book separately, before reading it aloud. This literacy group would also help improve her decoding skills because removing prefixes and suffixes from words of the books we're reading is a very common exercise we do together. For vowels, I have come up with several different hand motions, sayings, phonic games, etc, to help remember vowel sounds. The nice thing about this group is that it is small, meaning the students get my undivided attention to help their needs. This is also nice because the students in their groups are at the same level, so therefore the students are all struggling with relatively the same concepts of reading. I am able to focus strictly on them to help them improve, and thus far it has been working out great. Let me know what you think!

Thank you,

Ms. Peel 

Mini Lesson Overview

For my mini lesson I think I am going to focus on comprehension of stories. Since the first semester I have not seen a lot of language arts so I am going to double check this week if this is okay with my mentor teacher. My plan is to have the student read a book aloud and than have them retell the story by using the QRI stories and check lists of comprehension. From that lesson I plan to reflect and alter the next activity based on how well the first mini lesson goes.

Post for April 1-Vocabulary

While reading pages 237-240 in Tompkins (chapter 7) I was trying to think of ways that the students that I work with discussed/reviewed different vocabulary words as a class and I realized they rarely do! Last week was actually the first time I saw the students work in a group to go over and discuss words that were challenging from a book the teacher was reading aloud. They used a white board with a line down the middle, one side was the words beginning with "Sh" and the other side were the words beginning with "Ch". They were working on differentiating between the two starting letters/sounds. I could tell by observing them that they were enjoying the activity as they were able to write the words out on the whiteboard and work together. This was fun to see.

I also got to thinking about the reading program that their Internship Teacher (Ms. Showerman) and I do with the students. This program is designed to help the lowest leveled readers of our class. There are 7 students who are still at a first grade reading level so we work with them in 2 groups (be level), once a day, for a 1/2 hour in order to help them improve. During this time we read a short book alone, then together, and then we go through and review the vocabulary words we struggled with on at each page. While they are reading, I will have a white board in front of me and I will write down the words that they struggle with to remember which ones we for sure need to go over.
A lot of the time I notice the students struggle with the ending words such as "ing" or "ed", however when we break them apart and read them in different pieces, they do just fine. I think they have the mindset while reading that if the word looks longer, it is harder, so they struggle with words that have ending words. I have also noticed this program we've been doing with the students is helping them a lot. We have given them ways to recognize different sounds, like pinching your arm and saying "OUch" for "o" vowels, and we've taught them how to cover up the ending words in order to help them sound out each word, and overall they have grasped onto these quickly. I am excited to see how much they will progress by the end of the year! :)

I plan to use vocab for one of my reading instruction lessons, however I have not yet discussed with my mentor teacher what to do just yet.

New Literacies Project-Birnkrant

Originally, I thought the term literacy meant “being able to read and write" or "versed in literature or creative writing and having knowledge or competence.”  However, over the past few weeks and from our new literacy projects I realized that there are many different definitions of the word literacy.  For instance, cultural literacy refers to being able to understand different cultures.  Someone might be culturally literate if he or she can speak or translate a culture’s language or distinguish similarities and differences between certain cultures.  I think it is vital that teachers educate students on how everyone comes from a unique background and culture and that each culture is special in its own way.  Teachers can have discussions, read books that cover different cultures or learn and celebrate certain holidays or rituals from different cultures in the classroom. 

This project also helped me explore a new type of technology that I can envision myself using when I begin my teaching career.  The website that my group used was storybird.com, which allows students or teachers to create digital stories that can be viewed by anyone online.  The website also lets you record your voice telling the story if you choose to do so.  This technology is an easy and engaging way to teach certain lessons to students and it can also be used to test students’ knowledge about material learned in the classroom or make reflections in the form of stories. 

An important thing that teachers should consider is that classrooms tend to be made up of many diverse students and it is important that teachers cater to each of these students and their needs.  I think that trial and error is key when beginning to teach students from diverse backgrounds so that the teacher can determine what methods of teaching work best for his or her students overall.  Teachers should be familiar with various resources and means of technology to aid them in their lessons and effectively teach literacy to students. 

According to one of the Common Core Standards for third grade students should be able to “Recount stories, including fables, folktales, and myths from diverse cultures; determine the central message, lesson, or moral and explain how it is conveyed through key details in the text” (CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.3.2).  One way that students can use digital literacy to reach this goal is to be given class time to research the history of a story, fable, folktale or myth and then recount the story by making their own mini stories on the storybird website.  They could be told to incorporate a page that includes facts about the culture that they found on the Internet.  The teacher would have to make sure that the students first know how to use the Internet and how to search for different information on it.  They would have to understand the format of the website that they use and how to read it from left to right among other simple tasks.  By giving a brief discussion and/or review prior to having students use computers and the Internet would most likely be helpful for the students.  This project was really beneficial, because I now better understand what the word literacy means and can define it in different contexts.  I also now know how to use the website Storybird and look forward to using it in the future! 

(Sorry I originally posted this on the main New Literacies website so it is a little late on here)