Downer: reading lesson overview

There are a couple students in my classroom that struggle with sounding out large words. The students have difficulty breaking words apart and sounding out different syllables in words. Two of the students are English language learners; they struggle with understanding English and being able to sound out difficult words.  English is not spoken at home so the students have great difficulty receiving the help they need to become stronger English readers. Since English is not spoken at home they are not provided with extra practice in reading English books at home. The two students often read difficult books in school but do not understand what they are reading. This causes them to have great difficulty when they have to sound out a difficult word because they are not able to use text clues to help them sound out the word.

 The other two students have low reading levels, the students also struggle with being able to read selected text and understand the information they are reading to help them decode difficult words. The students often read books of lower level when provided time to read for fun. This provides the students to never have to work on their decoding skills because they do not push themselves to read more difficult books. When they need to read difficult books for school they are often behind on their reading and not able to provide an explanation of what they have read. It is clear that the students reading fluency is very low with them reading word by word, this has lead to a decrease in their ability to comprehend the information. 

With these four students I plan on focusing on providing them the tools in breaking apart difficult words by sounding out the different syllables. Helping students understand how to appropriately break up different syllables in a word is very important, for example there is one vowel sound in each syllable (Tompkins, page 200). I plan on helping students understand the different syllabication rules that Tompkins has provided to help the students understand where different syllables are in a word. This will help the four students to be able to sound out difficult words when they are aware of how to appropriately break apart words. The first lesson I plan on is providing students with a list of words where the students will have to break up the words into syllables. This will show me where the students are at and what information they already know. I am predicting that the students will not know how to break up syllables because I have not seen the students use they strategy when approached with a difficult word. After the students have completed the short task I will work with the students in learning the rules and understanding where to correctly break words up. The next lesson I will continue working with the four students on knowing where to break up difficult words. I will provide games for the students to play to help them continually learn how to break words up correctly. At the end of the second lesson I will have the four students take turns reading a book out loud. I will make sure this book is a little difficult with ample amount of words that they will have to sound out. After reading I will provide the students with another sheet of words to see what the students have learned and what the students still struggle with when breaking words into syllables.