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!