Literacy Lesson Pre-Reflection

In order to make decisions regarding my clinical literacy lesson I referred back to the assessments I administered on a select few students in my class. I chose three students to test on the areas of alphabet knowledge, sight words, and fluency. Of these three areas, the students had the most difficulty with fluency. The test that I administered to test fluency was a fluency rubric that tested the areas of expression and volume, phrasing, smoothness, and pace. One at a time, I pulled each student aside and had him or her select a book that was at their reading level to read to me. Then, I had them read the book aloud to me as I scored them using the fluency rubric. The rubric had a possible sixteen points and at the bottom of the sheet it said, “scores below 10 indicate that the student needs additional instruction”. The three students that I tested all fell between the scores of six and eight, which told me that they all needed extra supports in the area of fluency. The strengths of these students in regards to the areas of fluency was phrasing so I decided not to focus on this area for the lesson. The categories of fluency that they all struggled the most with were expression/volume and pace. While I know that some of this is a result of these students still being in the beginning stages of reading, I feel like there are definitely ways to help them develop these skills.

When I shared the results of my assessments with my teacher, she agreed that doing a lesson on fluency would be most beneficial for the students. She also said that this is aspect of literacy that she feels all of the students in her class could improve in. I have noticed that even the students in the strongest reading groups do not read with expression and appropriate pace. These are skills that need to be explicitly taught in order for students to understand their importance. Therefore, I decided to make my literacy lesson a small group activity that teaches students about using appropriate expression and pace while reading. My teacher asked me to do my lesson during the literacy centers. Centers last for twenty minutes total and are divided into two, twenty-minute rotations every day. The centers contain five to six students each. This information also shaped the idea for my lesson because I knew it had to be completed in twenty minutes, have a quick clean up time, and not be too loud/distracting for the rest of the class.

Based on all of this information, I decided to do a “Reader’s Theatre” style lesson. I wanted to make sure to both explicitly teach the students and give them the opportunity to practice what they learn. I plan on modeling reading a passage of a book in a very monotone way and with a quick pace in order to get students thinking about how I could improve my reading. They will help me come up with ways that I can read in a more fluent way. After I explicitly teach them about expression and pace, students will have the opportunity to read a story in “Reader’s Theatre” style with a partner. If there are an odd number of students I will be a partner with a student. In order to make sure this lesson is developmentally appropriate, I will first have students practice reading the lines without worrying about expression or pace. Then, they will add in these elements. I have also made sure to differentiate for the different levels of the reading groups by writing stories that vary in difficulty.

The content presented in this lesson is important for kindergarten-aged students to learn because reading with expression and pace are crucial skills to obtain in order to become a fluent reader. These are skills that may seem obvious to adults but need to be taught explicitly to children. My literacy lesson will involve students in thinking critically about ways to be a good reader and have them practice using these skills. I also know that these students have learned about how different types of punctuation can impact how a sentence is read (exclamation mark, period, and question mark). In my lesson I will review these different types of punctuation and have them practice reading the same sentence three times with a different punctuation mark ending it each time. This will help students to think about using these punctuation marks as clues about how they should be reading a sentence. Then, when they are reading together as partners, I will also remind them to pay attention to these punctuation marks.

I chose to write my own stories for the students to read because I knew that my teacher wanted the lesson to work on “short u” sounds. Therefore, I made sure to include these types of words in the stories. I also chose to write my own stories because I knew that I would need stories that varied in difficulty for the different levels of the reading groups. For my lesson, I also chose to use the materials of a small white board, character cards, and an expression die. The white board will allow me to write sentences and practice punctuation concepts with the students. The character cards are small pieces of paper that I will hand out to the students to help them remember which character they are for the reading. I know that this is something that the students may forget quickly so having the visual in front of them will help. Lastly, the expression die is a tool that students will use at the end of the lesson to randomly select a type of expression for them to read the story in. This is a fun way to get students thinking about expression and practicing applying it. Overall, all of these materials will help to support the students in reaching the objectives of the lesson.

I will know that students have met the objectives of this lesson based on my observations and a checklist that I will fill out during the activity. I will be looking to see if students demonstrate appropriate expression for punctuation marks, expression during the die activity, and if they read with appropriate pace. I will also be sure to add comments to my checklist so that I will be able to remember specific aspects of how each child was doing when I look back at it. Additionally, I will be listening to the partners while they read in order to scaffold them as I see fit.