Parker: Reading Lesson Overview

Reading Lesson Overview:

For my two reading lessons, I am focusing on a group of four first grade students that my mentor teacher considers “mid-level” in terms of the language arts standards for their grade.  These four students have been assigned to work together in literacy centers because of their common strengths and weaknesses in multiple aspects of literacy development.  Two of these students, Alex and Nate, are considered English Second Language Learners, but can speak English fairly well.  In addition to being an ESL student, Alex has also spends time with the school speech teacher because of various speech impediments.  The third student, Xavier, often displays non-compliant and off-task behavior, thus, has fallen behind in many aspects of literacy.  Gus, the fourth student, often misses school and therefore, has also fallen behind in many aspects. 

After discussing with my mentor teacher, I have chosen to focus my first lesson on phonemic awareness, and my second lesson on fluency.  Unfortunately, my mentor teacher was only able to provide me with assessment data on these students’ skills in phonemic awareness.  However, these assessments were given in September and October, at the beginning of the year.  Below is a list of the average scores of the four students on each assessment given:

·         Phonemic Segmentation: 4.5 out of 8

·         Onset and Rime: 7 out of 8

·         Phoneme Blending: 6.5 out of 8

·         Rhyme Choice: 6 out of 8

·         Rhyme Supply: 4.25 out of 8

Given that these assessments were done at the beginning of the year, these particular skills of the students have much improved.  In fact, my students have moved on to more complex aspects of phonemic awareness such as the examination of digraphs and blends.  However, because the students scored the lowest on segmentation and rhyme supply and with consideration of the current time in the school year, my mentor teacher recommended that I design a lesson that combines initial consonant blends and phonemic segmentation.  More specifically, she recommended that the lesson involve a sorting activity with a t-chart, which is something that students are familiar with doing.  Tompkins (2010) also recommends this in a discussion about sound-matching activities: “In sound matching, children choose one of the several words beginning with a particular sound or say a word that begins with a particular sound…teachers use familiar objects…toys…as well as pictures of familiar objects” (p. 150).  Using pictures or objects and pairing them with sounds especially supports ESL students.

In addition to a lesson on phonemic awareness, I have also chosen to do a lesson on fluency.  As stated before, my mentor teacher could not provide me with printed assessment data, but rather discussed her observations of the four students while reading aloud, particularly when they are in the “Read to Teacher” literacy center.  I have also made many observations of my own, specifically in the prosody levels at which the students read.  Due to low word recognition, some of the texts that the students read sound choppy and broken up; as my mentor teacher says, these students often sound like “robots”. 

Although many other areas of fluency are lacking, I have chosen to only focus on prosody to refrain from overwhelming the students.  I have chosen to use an independent level text of my students so that word recognition will not be a defining factor in the success of the lesson.  As noted by many, the less time students are focusing on word recognition, the more cognitive space is allowed for other aspects of fluency.  In terms of teaching prosody, Tompkins recommends teaching students how to phrase or chunk together parts of sentences in order to read with expression.  She states, “Teachers work with nonfluent readers to break sentences up into chunks and then read the sentences with expression…After chunking, students practice reading the sentence with classmates and individually” (p. 210).  She later recommends using choral reading, echo reading, or unison reading.  In addition, my mentor teacher suggested recording students reading a page of the book and then having students analyze the recording, identifying it as either “fluid” or “like a robot”.  Therefore, I have chosen to combine this type of analysis and echo reading of an independent level text to improve students’ prosody.