So far my lessons have been going pretty well. The three that I made into the daily lesson plans started with my second lesson. The first lesson I taught out of my daily lesson plans was blending and stretching out words they do not know. I am fortunate enough to have a smart board in my classroom and this was a key factor in most of my lessons. It gives the students a chance to interact in the lesson and they really love playing with it, so it keeps them engaged. The first thing I did was to pass out rubber bands so that we could stretch out the words together. I did a model for 'cat'. First I would write the word out on the board. Immediately students would say the word out loud so if I were to teach this lesson again I would not write the word down. I wanted them to see the word and connect it to the letter sound but I wish I had tried to just say the word and have them stretch it with me then we could have figured out how to spell it based on sounds we heard. This lesson was particularly hard to assess because we did it as a group and everyone was speaking at the same time. I tried to make sure I was watching to see if all the students were stretching the rubber bands at the correct times and I was also listening to see if they were saying the correct letter sounds. I paid particular attention to the students whom I know have trouble reading, even short one syllable words. I had a “spur of the moment” idea when I was teaching at the end of my lesson where I wanted to test the students to see if they could stretch out a word they had never seen before. I opened up a dictionary to a random page and picked out a word. It was ‘magnesium’, a word which I know none of the students had read before. We tried to stretch it out and I heard some stretch it out right and some who did not. So I broke down the word to show them how when they stretch out the word they say those exact same sounds, just blended all together really fast. I pointed out that I heard some students saying “mag-eh-nesium” and I told them because there is no –e before the –n that they should not say the /e/ sound. Thinking back towards the lesson I could have chosen a more simple word because I think it confused some of the students. At this time I had them choose some words they wanted to sound out. It got them back on track and more engaged in the lesson. I was surprised that most of the students successfully sounded out the word, which helps me figure out who I need to further work with on stretching out words they do not know. I can easily do this in my guided reading groups because the students are grouped according to reading level and fluency level so that will be my main objective in the group that I noticed were struggling the most during the lesson.
The next day I taught my next literacy lesson which was about rereading. There was not much I could assess on them for this lesson, but I wanted them to realize the importance of rereading once they have stretched and blended the words they do not know. I chose to pick out a book and demonstrate what I meant. At first I pretended I did not know the words so I worked on stretching them out and then continued on reading. I had some students who blurted out saying, “wait, I don’t know what you just read!” at that moment I stopped and said, “ok, so what should I do?” I called on a student and he answered that I should go back and reread the sentence again. I wanted to point out that he said I should go back and reread the whole sentence and not just the word I stretched out. This showed them that they can reread the word, but they need to make sure that the word makes sense with the rest of the sentence. I then met with my guided reading group, who are below a third grade reading level, and we focused on going back and rereading. It is a simple concept and they understand what it means to go back and reread, I just really wanted to reiterate how important it is to reread because most of the students in this group rush through or skip words they do not know. If I were to re-do this lesson I do not know of much I would change. I think I would have chosen a book that the students had never read before because the book I chose (Alexander and the Horrible Terrible No Good Very Bad Day) was familiar to some of the students and they were able to guess what I was saying because they had read the story before.
So far, this lesson has been my favorite! The lesson is called making words and it is super easy to assess the students because they spell the words out right on their desks. Throughout the whole lesson as I am saying the words they have to spell out I am constantly walking around looking at their desks and jotting down if they spelled the words right or not. The only problem was I ran out of time to go back through the words but I will do this at a different time in the day. I just wanted it to be at the same time but the students had to go to kinetics. For the most part the students were able to spell the words correctly. The words start at simple two letter words such as “an” and “at” then we moved onto three letter words like “man, mat, tan, and ant”. After that it goes to four then five, and up to the ‘secret’ word which uses all 8 letters that they have. As we are spelling the words I am also testing them on their knowledge of some phonics such as, ‘Do these words use short or long vowel sounds?” and “When you spelled out the words ‘tuna’ and ‘aunt’ what did you have to do with the letters?” All they had to do was switch the first and last letters. I pointed out that even though these words have the same letters they sound different. This brought up the rule about vowels when they are together the first one does the talking. At the end of the lesson was my favorite part, the students have been spelling words that build up to the secret word and they have to figure it out on their own. The word they spelled before the secret word (mountain is the secret word) they spelled ‘amount’ so I gave the clue once I saw some students struggling that the word ‘mount’ is part of the secret word. I wish we had more time to go over differences and patterns in the words and if I were to do this lesson over again I would have went at a faster pace because the students spelled the words correctly most of the time. This would have given me more time to go over the misspelled words and clear up any confusion about the spelling.
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