Downer:reflection one

I taught my first lesson this past Friday; I was originally going to pick five random words with I first thought of this lesson. However, on Wednesday the students started reading Spirit Bear by Ben Mikaelsen. I was listening to two of my students that I had chosen and they were struggling with some large words in the book. I decided to pick words from the book since it would be more relevant to them. When I first introduced this lesson to my four students they were not very thrilled, Jacob did not understand the importance of having to learn rules on breaking words into syllables and Eva did not see anything wrong with just skipping the words she does not understand. It took a couple of minutes for them to get on topic; I provided them the list of words for them to break up into syllables. Lauren just sat there looking at the sheet; she kept saying she didn't know how to break the words into the syllables. She said she already new most of the words and did not understand why she had to participate. The students finally finished the activity; I then went through the rules with the students. This was quite a struggle as well, none of the students had ever heard of these rules and they became quickly confused with the wording of the rules. I decided to alter the rules so that they made sense to the students and were easier to understand.

I then went with the students through the words that they first broke into syllables and asked them if any of them would like to change their first thoughts. Some of the students changed a couple of the syllables to the correct markings. We then went through the words and I had the students sound out the words according to how they broke up the syllables. While reading through the words Eva was becoming very frustrated. I new she would when planning the lesson because she often just skips over challenging words so that she can keep reading so that she can quickly finish. Jacob and Lauren did a great job of breaking up the words into syllables, they do the best job of sounding out difficult words and taking time to figure out a word they did not understand. I was however surprised by Josh; he also becomes very frustrated with sounding out words and is at a low reading level. However, after helping him with the rules and breaking some words into syllables he was able to sound out the words.  I would like to keep working with Josh especially because I feel that after spending some additional time helping him learn to break up words he will become a more fluent reader.