Monday, November 15, 2010

Guided Lead Teaching: Shared Reading

Two Week Shared Reading Unit

Day 3:

Lesson Overview: Reread enlarged book, Look Out The Window together whole-class. Draw name sticks and children will retell the story, one person (and event) at a time. The first person will tell what the character saw first, the next person will tell what he saw second, and so on. Use retelling pictures in back of book to check if students are correct.

Day 3 Reflection:
•Overall, this lesson was successful and students learned how to check their understanding of a story by retelling major events after reading. While most students could retell the events of the story in the order in which they occurred, I noticed that my most struggling readers had difficulty remembering the order events happened. This may because their reading instruction focuses mainly on saying words phonetically, using strategies to decode unknown words, self-correcting, etc. As a result, they have not had as much practice with reading comprehension and may not have paid as much attention to the events in the story.
•I learned that many of my students can make inferences when reading. For example, one line in the text repeated, “Look out the window, look everyone. But when everyone looked, the [animal] was gone.” After reading, I asked students how Pablo was seeing these animals and why no one else could see them. A few students responded that he was seeing them in the clouds and when everyone else looked, the clouds had moved and changed shape. When asking how they knew, I received responses like “I looked at the picture,” “The clouds are shaped like animals,” and “He couldn’t be really seeing lions and whales at school.” Overall, the text never actually expressed that Pablo was seeing animals in the clouds, but by looking at the illustrations and thinking about what makes sense, students were able to infer that that was happening.”
•Students who need additional support (along with the rest of the students in the class) will receive additional instruction and practice with retelling. The next Making Meaning unit focuses on retelling, where we will spend two days on one book—reading the first day and retelling as a class the second day. Additionally, for students who struggled to retell in this lesson, I will confer with them during independent reading and ask them to read and then retell their stories to me. For students who need more guidance with this, I can say “While you were reading to me, I noticed four main events that happened in the story. Retell the story using four fingers.”
•If I were to teach this lesson again, I might stop after each major event (i.e. every time Pablo describes what he sees in the clouds) and point this out to students. For students who struggled during the lesson, this would highlight the important events that they need to pay attention to when they’re reading.


Day 4


Lesson Overview: Reread text together whole-class. Cover (with sticky notes) the words that tell what Pablo sees (i.e. lion, lamb, whale, etc.) As we come across these covered words, guide students to look first at the illustration, then cross check with the first letter of the covered word.

Day 4 Reflection:
•Overall, this lesson went well and students were able to determine all of the covered words. Students learned to check two sources of information when encountering an unknown word while reading. Particularly in this lesson, students cross-checked the illustration with the first letter of the unknown word to figure it out. It was difficult for me to tell which students struggled with the lesson, as not all students were able to share ideas with the class during our discussion. All of the students who were able to share identified appropriate animals based on the illustrations and then were able to correctly identify the unknown word based on the first letter. After one student gave a suggestion for the covered word, I had students put their thumbs up if they were thinking the same word (I could see that almost all students did). However, this could be interpreted as some students simply putting thumbs up because they saw that their classmates did or because they had no ideas of their own.
•Through this lesson, I learned that students can pick up on repetition. After the first few days of reading the book, students had the repeating part of the story (“Look out the window, look everyone. But when everyone looked the [animal] was gone.”) memorized and could read along at that part. Noticing and being able to reiterate the repeating lines is a skill that will help my beginning readers.
•The following week during Reader’s Workshop our lessons will focus on cross-checking. We will teach students that when coming to an unknown word, they should ask: Does it sound right? Does it look right? Does it make sense? Additionally, we’ve sent home a newsletter to parents describing what the cross-checking strategy is and how they can help their child practice and use it at home. Overall, it is a skill that we will come back to throughout the year.
•If I were to teach this lesson again, I would plan this activity on day one or two of reading the book instead of towards the end of the week. I know that several children knew the covered word simply because they were familiar with the text and storyline. In order to ensure that students determine the covered word by cross-checking, I would repeat this lesson with text that students are less familiar with.

Day 5

Lesson Overview: Reread text together whole-class. Display pictures of clouds over projector. Draw name sticks and have 2-3 students respond to each picture like Pablo did in the story (I see a [animal] [action] by; i.e. I see a lion roaring by).

Day 5 Reflection:
•In this lesson, students learned how to make connections to text. Earlier in the week I asked students if they had ever looked at clouds and seen different shapes or animals. In this lesson, students could pretend to be the main character, Pablo and look for different images in clouds. Thus, they connected with the character and gained a more meaningful understanding of the text. Although all of my students were able to appropriately find animals in the shapes of clouds, I noticed that my ELL students had a difficult time expressing it in the format I wanted. Specifically, I wanted students to respond “I see a [animal] [action] by.” (for example, “I see a lion roaring by.”) Some of my ELL students struggled to produce an appropriate action that matched the animal they saw. For example, one of my Japanese students said “I see fish walking by.” They likely struggled here because they were unfamiliar with the English words, not because they aren’t aware of what specific animals do.
•I learned that my students have very limited understanding of quotation marks. One student explicitly asked what those marks [quotation marks] meant. When I turned the question back over to the students, no one even felt comfortable guessing. I briefly described that they are something writers use to show when someone is speaking and I had one student pretend that they were Pablo. I wanted them to say only the part in the quotation marks (“Look out the window, look everyone.”), but the student read the text outside of the quotation marks as well. I provided a few more examples of sentences with quotation marks, but it’s clear that they need more instruction in this area.
•Making connections is a skill that we will practice frequently throughout first grade. Through our Making Meaning units and read-alouds during snack I will model how I make thick connections to text. Additionally, during independent reading time, students will have the opportunity to practice making personal connections to the characters, problems, solutions, themes, etc. in the stories they read.
•If I were to teach this lesson again, I would first have a student share with the class what image they see in the cloud. Then, I would have the class work together to brainstorm a list of actions that would make sense for that animal to be doing (i.e. if a student saw a lion in the cloud picture, it would make sense for that lion to be roaring by, running by, jumping by, galloping by, etc.). This would improve students’ learning by taking the pressure off of individual students when it’s their turn to share. It also gives more students the opportunity to participate throughout the lesson and work collaboratively with peers.

1 comment:

  1. I like how you made use of retelling in your shared reading lessons. This is something that I would be interested in doing in my classroom, mostly because we are beginning to use retelling strategies in our reader’s workshop – practicing these in shared reading would be great exposure prior to our reader’s workshop! The experience that I have had with students retelling parts of the story – mostly just from our DRA testing, was that they could all include nearly all the parts of the story, but could not necessarily do this in chronological order. I feel that this is a process that will have to be retaught, and practiced over and over again so that the students get more exposure to how to retell a story with a beginning, middle and end in mind.

    Your second lesson is definitely something we used in shared reading and the students absolutely love this! When you had your words covered up, did the students all shout out the words without even having to use the strategy of looking at the illustration and first letter? This is something that I found problematic when trying to teach this strategy (what we call “Cross-Checking Cheetah”) because the students were not having to use the strategy but rather remembered from reading the text days prior and simply knowing the text. They definitely pick up on repetition, as you said! This helps with the fluency which we are focusing on now, and it is a big help when we do our shared reading and the students are hearing themselves read in a talking voice rather than a robotic voice – this offers a concrete example of how they should sound when they are reading during reader’s workshop!

    I really like the lesson you had planned for your day 5. Not only did your lesson have your students make connections but I also feel that it made them think back to the text and its repetition and how to formulate the text into words. This is something that we just started using – shared writing – where the students have read the book a few times, and then they are asked to use the text and incorporate new words to make a “new page” in the book. I also like your revision/what you might do next time – I feel that the students would really enjoy working as a group to talk about the actions that the specific animals can make!

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