Stephens Minilesson Reflection 2

All of the students participated in the lesson, but some more actively than others. There were certain students who always answered all of the questions and some that never raised their hands. All students seemed to be paying attention, but I overheard some comments that some of the students were bored. Some of the questions I asked seemed a little bit too easy for them, like the last question in Activity 2. When I assigned the poems in Activity 3, some of the students were really grumbling about it. A couple of them could not seem to get started on their poems. I tried to help them by asking them what their favorite thing was and trying to get them to write about that, but it seemed like they had just shut down. One of them in particular was so turned off towards poetry that he just sat there with his hands on his hear for a long time. He was really stressed out by it, even though I let him write a Haiku rather than a Tanka (since it was shorter). As I watched him, he also struggled to find the right number of syllables for each line. His first line had six syllables the first time I looked at it. I had to stand by him for the rest of the time while he wrote it, giving him help as he wrote each line. I am still unsure whether he really understands syllables.

It was kind of frustrating teaching most of the lesson at the front of the class, because I could tell which students understood what I was doing perfectly and which ones could definitely use more work on it. It was very difficult with all of the varying ability levels to keep the students who already knew how to syllabify words interested while still finding time to help those who were struggling. I definitely feel like my lesson was aimed at the mid-level students. I could not figure out during the discussion portion how to provide scaffolding for the struggling students while engaging the ones who knew what they were doing. It was a lot better when the students got to write their own poems, because then I could walk around and help those who were struggling and those who needed a challenge wrote Tanka instead of a Haiku.

I noticed that while I am teaching, if I notice some students getting bored with the lesson, I tend to freak out and start going through it really fast. This is a really bad habit because those who are struggling cannot get anything out of the lesson when I go faster and it becomes more boring to those who were already bored with it. When I go faster, it seems like I am not very interested in the lesson myself and causes the students not to listen. What are some strategies that I could use while I’m up at the front of the class to engage students who are getting bored? I suppose I could use humor to make the lesson more interesting. I also could have used more visual aids in my preparation for the lesson, to make the students more interested in it. I think the most important thing is not to freak out when students seem to be bored, but to calmly switch tactics. Rushing through a lesson does not help anybody.

Stephens Lesson Plan 2

Rationale (What evidence do you have that your focus students need to learn this skill/strategy?):
The students are learning about poetry, some of them for the first time. One of the students in the class talked about a Haiku having 5-7-5 syllables. I briefly had him define a syllable, but some of the students still seemed confused about syllables. This lesson will help them with their poetry by teaching them about syllables. It will also reinforce their knowledge of how to use a dictionary. This lesson will help the students in the future to achieve some of the Michigan GLCEs for fifth grade, including:
R.WS.05.02 use structural, syntactic, and semantic cues including letter-sound, rimes, base words, affixes, and syllabication to automatically read frequently encountered words, decode unknown words, and decide meanings including multiple meaning words.
W.GN.05.02 write poetry based on reading a wide variety of grade-appropriate poetry.

Objective for this lesson (performance, condition, criteria): Students will be able to divide words into syllables and use this knowledge to individually write a poem with a form requiring a certain number of syllables per verse.

Materials & supplies needed: Smart board and markers, smartboard poems, Dictionaries for all students, Haiku and Tanka study guides, language arts journals, pencils
Procedures and approximate time allocated for each event

• Introduction to the lesson
Please grab a dictionary and go back to your desks. Also get out your language arts journals and a pencil. Fifth graders, do you remember the lesson I taught you about poetry? Who can tell me what was special about a Haiku? Look for the answer that it had 5-7-5 syllables. Does anyone remember how we defined a syllable? A syllable is a small part of a word containing a vowel and possibly some other letters as well. All syllables contain at least one vowel, but they may or may not have any other letters in them. Today we will be learning about syllabification, which is dividing words into syllables. Syllabification can be used to show how a word is pronounced. Have you ever seen a word at the end of a line in a book that has a hyphen after it? How do you think that word is divided? The word is divided into syllables, so syllabification can show us where to divide a word at the end of a line when we are writing. (5 minutes)

• OUTLINE of key events during the lesson
Activity 1: Syllabification discussion
Write the word “cough” on the Smartboard. Everyone please turn to the word cough in the dictionary. The dictionary usually divides words into syllables with dots in between. Who can tell me where the dot is in the word “cough”? Look for the answer that there is no dash in the word cough.
Write the word “fearless” on the board. Could everyone look up “fearless”? When you find it, please raise your hand. __, could you come up and write the syllabification of the word “fearless” on the board? It should be fear-less. So how many syllables are in the word “fearless”? Look for the answer 2.
Write viburnum on the Smartboard. Everyone, look up viburnum. First, could someone please tell me what viburnum means? Expected answer: shrubs or trees. Thank you. Could you come write the syllabification of viburnum on the Smartboard? It should be vi-bur-num. How many syllables does the word viburnum have? Expected answer: 3.
Write the word “clear-cut” on the Smartboard. Everyone look up “clear-cut”. How many syllables are in “clear-cut”? Expected answer: 2. How do you know? Expected answer: It is divided by a hyphen. So the dictionary usually uses either dots or hyphens to divide syllables. How many syllables can a word have? Can it have one? Three? Do you think a word could have four? Yeah, the number of syllables in a word just depends on the length of the word and the vowels in the word. Do you see any patterns in how these words are divided? Expected responses: Usually between two consonants, in viburnum after a vowel, every syllable has a vowel and some have more than one. (5 minutes)

Activity 2: Poem activity
Put the poem “Farewell! Like a Bee” on the smartboard. This is the poem that we discussed a couple weeks ago. Now we are going to try to divide this poem into syllables and see how many are in each verse. We’re going to do the first verse together. Point to the first line of the poem as you read it. Farewell! Like a bee. So does anyone have an idea of how to divide “farewell”? You can use your dictionary if you need to. Give the students a minute, then call on someone. Have the student come up to the board and mark where the word should be divided. How did you know it needed to be divided there? So look at the next three words, “like a bee”. Any idea how many syllables are in those three words? (there should be one in each). So how many syllables are in this verse altogether? (5) Write the numbers 1-5 above each syllable in the first line. Reveal second poem below the first one. Now I would like you to work alone or with a partner and divide the rest of the poem “Farewell Like a Bee” into syllables, using hyphens and writing it in your LA journals. At the end of every verse, I would like you to write down how many syllables were in that verse. You can use your dictionary if you would like. I will come around and try to help if you get stuck. If you finish before we go over this, try to divide the other poem into syllables.
When the poem is divided, it should look like this:

Fare-well! Like a bee
Re-luc-tant to leave the deeps
Of a pe-o-ny.

An old si-lent pond
A frog jumps in-to the pond
Splash! Si-lence a-gain.

Walk around the class and help students who are struggling. Encourage those who are struggling to look in their dictionary to help them find the number of syllables in each word. Go over the answers as a class, calling on students to hyphenate verses. Ask the students how many syllables are in each verse for both of the poems. So as you can see, these two poems have the same pattern of syllables. This is because they are both Haikus. Haikus are poems with five syllables in the first verse, seven syllables in the second verse, and five syllables in the third verse. There are more forms, or types of poems that have a set number of syllables per verse. One is called a Tanka. A Tanka has five verses. The pattern of syllables in a Tanka looks like this: write on the board 5, under it 7, under it 5, under it 7, under that 7. So what do these numbers mean? (Check to make sure the students understand that they mean the number of syllables in that verse). (10 minutes).

• Closing summary for the lesson (How will you bring closure to the lesson and involve children in reflecting on their experiences? How will you involve them making connections to prior lessons or prepare for future experiences? What kind of feedback do you want from them at this time?) Do you feel like you understand how syllables work now? Do you have any questions? What might you use this knowledge of syllables to do? (write a poem with a certain number of syllables per line, divide words at the end of a line with a hyphen if you run out of space) (3 minutes)

Activity 3: Write your own poem
What I would like you to do now is to work individually to write your own Haiku or Tanka. Usually these poems describe nature, but you can write about anything you like, as long as it is appropriate. The most important thing is to make sure that the poem has the correct number of syllables in each line. I would like you to hyphenate your poem, the way we hyphenated the “Farewell! Like a Bee” poem. I have laminated guides about the Haiku and Tanka up here at the front table. You can look at them to help you with writing your poem. Hold up the guides and then put them back on the table. Feel free to use your dictionaries. You can go ahead and get started now. Turn them in to the language arts bin when you are finished. When you are finished, you can work independently. Leave the poems on the smartboard so that students may refer back to them if needed. Grade the poems based on the number of syllables per verse and whether the words are correctly divided into syllables, 3 points for the number of syllables per verse and 7 points for syllabification of individual words. (10 minutes)


Ongoing-Assessment: (How will you know the students are progressing toward your identified objective? What will you observe for and/or take notes on to help you plan follow-up instruction?) At the beginning, I will know from their responses to my questions how well they understand the concept of syllables. When I have the students divide the poems into syllables, I will be able to walk around and see from their papers whether they are understanding syllabification or not. At the end of the lesson, I will be able to tell from the poems that the students write themselves whether or not they understood how to divide words into syllables and how to write poems with set numbers of syllables.

Stephens Minilesson Overview 2

My CT wanted me do a whole class lesson again, although this time she wanted me to teach both the 5th and 6th graders (about 24 students total). They are starting a unit on poetry, so the students need some of the background knowledge necessary to understand different kinds of poetry. Syllabification will help the students understand poems such as Haikus, which have a certain number of syllables in every verse. Going into this lesson, I do not know which students may struggle with the concept. I anticipate that some of them will have a negative attitude towards poetry in general. I also expect that some of the students will not understand syllables very well at first, although they all have already had experience with a dictionary, which will aid them in finding the syllabification of words. The fifth graders will have background knowledge from my poetry discussion lesson that I can draw on. They should have a rough understanding from that lesson of what a syllable is. They should also remember how to clap and figure out the number of syllables in a word.

Stephens Minilesson Reflection 1

I ended up having to change my lesson the day of based on what my CT wanted. She wanted me to add an assessment at the end of the lesson in which I asked students to come up with their own word family using the roots dis- and in-. She also had me use notecards on the carpet rather than on the board and did not want me to use the Smartboard. Another thing she changed was the amount of words that I asked the students to spell. She told me to pick about six rather than doing all of them. We still did the related words activity with all of the words though.

My students were all actively participating in the lesson and all seemed engaged. Their response to it was positive. One boy even commented “we should do this more often.” As to their learning, I think they understood what was going on, but some of them definitely struggled with the assessment portion. These students understood what dis- and in- meant, but were having difficulty coming up with words that contained them. To be honest, I do not think that was the best assessment. Some of the students came up with words that did not make sense with the given meanings of dis- and in-. For example, one student came up with the word “discourage”. According to the meaning of the prefix, this would mean not courage, or not brave. That is not really the meaning of that word, so it does not really help students to know that this word contains dis-. What would have been better would have been to give the students a word containing those prefixes that used the given meanings of them and ask them to figure out what the word meant. I feel like that is the point of teaching them prefixes; they can see the word being used in context and use their morphological knowledge to figure out what it means.

One thing that I noticed was that as I was teaching, I got caught up in the activity and forgot the goal of the lesson. I was so worried about the students putting together the word families that I forgot to connect it back to the objective. I feel like I have done this a lot in my teaching. In my future lessons, I will try to remind myself of the objective every so often so that I do not get so caught up in what we’re doing that I forget what the students are supposed to be learning. I still wonder if my students understand how they can use their knowledge of prefixes and suffixes. This would have been a good conclusion to the mini lesson. If I were the main teacher, in the future I would probably show the students how to use the knowledge of prefixes and suffixes in context.

DAROS ~ MINILESSON #2

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF FOCUS STUDENTS

M is a little African American boy in 2^nd grade. He is at a 1^st grade level, however, in reading and writing. He came to FV elementary about half-way through the first semester of class from Flint. He often has difficulty sitting still for long periods of time. He has also been known to quickly give up on an assignment and ask for help when he does know how to accomplish it. Sometimes I wonder if he just wants attention because once you walk over and talk to him about questions he has, he knows to do the assignment. Unfortunately, the day before I did my lesson, M was suspended, so he wasn’t there when I did my mini lessons, I could only do them with J.

J is also a little African American boy in 2^nd grade. He is at a 1^st grade level, however, in reading and writing. He came to FV elementary about half-way through the second semester of class, so I haven’t known him as long as I have known many of the other students. Because he is behind the rest of the class, I have worked with him one on one a few times or with M who is also behind. They have seats in the back of the classroom where they can get differentiated instruction consistently. He likes to walk around a lot and he tries to get out of the classroom by saying he has to go to the bathroom. I did this lesson with only J because M wasn’t there and because he really needed the help.

I know that this lesson is necessary and appropriate for these learners needs because they both need help reading. Having strategies in reading will help students become more motivated, especially if the strategy is fun, and will provide a way for students to gain confidence because they have ways to understand what they are reading and not continuously be fighting to catch up with the rest of the students.

When I asked my CT what she wanted me to do with my mini-lessons she said that it was completely up to me, so I based them off what I observed in the class and what I thought would be important for my students.

TE 402 READING LESSON PLAN

Daros Reading Lesson Plan # 2

Your Name: Kayla Daros Grade Level: 2^nd/3^rd Split

Date lesson was taught: Wednesday, April 20, 2011 Number of Students: 1

1) Rationale (What evidence do you have that your focus students need to learn this skill/strategy?):

It is important for students to have different strategies for reading comprehension, and I think that making predictions is a really fun way to do that, especially in a group setting because the students all come up with really fun and interesting ideas, and anyway to make reading more fun for students is a great thing to include in the classroom. I will have students write their ideas individually down on paper because then they won’t be influenced by what others say and they can write down what they really think.

2) List which reading skill/strategy is the main focus of your lesson (select ONE area):

Making predictions as a reading strategy

3) Objective for this lesson (performance, condition, criteria):

Students will make predictions about a text by writing down their ideas on paper and discussing them in a group setting.

4) Materials & supplies needed:

-paper and pencils

-book (“The Mitten”)

5) OUTLINE OF LESSON PLAN:

• Introduction to the lesson

-Today we’re going to do a mini lesson on predictions when reading a story.

-I want everyone to write down what they think a prediction is.

-I will have students read their answers.

-Predictions are guess about what is going to happen.

-I am going to read this story to you and we’re going to pause and you are going to write your predictions down about what you think is going to happen next in the story. Then we will go back and compare what you wrote down with what really happened.

(5 minutes)

• OUTLINE of key events during the lesson

-I will read the story and pause at these places providing them time to write down their predictions:

-I will pause every two pages, because there is always a mini picture before the next two pages of what will be on the next page. This way they can predict what they think will happen with the mini picture and predict how it will be a part of the main picture of the next page.

(10 minutes)

• Closing summary for the lesson

-I will review what prediction means and ask them why this might be useful for them when they are reading and how it might help them comprehend what is going on in the story. I will ask them how they can use this strategy for other stories.

(5 minutes)

6) Ongoing-Assessment:

I will know that my students are progressing toward my identified objective if they understand what a prediction is and are successful at making realistic predictions of what will happen next in the story that they are reading. I will observe the way students read stories in the future and how well they are at making up endings of stories that they are only told the beginnings of.

7) Based on what you know about your focus students, what Academic, Social and/or Linguistic Support will be needed during the lesson?

My focus students will need sufficient time to write what they predict on paper, however, they will need to be challenged, and wasting time and I can’t do its will not be accepted. Also I will be reading the story to them so they can focus on what is happening in the story, rather than struggling through reading. The goal of this lesson is for reading comprehension strategies not reading.

REFLECTION OF LESSON

Since M wasn’t there I did this lesson with J. My CT was doing reading with the rest of the class, and since he needs one-on-one help during this time anyway, she was definitely appreciative that I was going to take him out and work with him. He was very interested in participating and doing the lesson, however sometimes he had a hard time focusing and since we were in the hallway, he was distracted by noises and people walking around. My objective was for him to make predictions about a text but writing down their ideas on paper and discussing them in a group setting. Since I only did the lesson with one student, I didn’t have him write his answers because it was just easier for us to discuss them.

He knew what predictions were but he had a hard time verbalizing a definition so we just talked about it. The strengths of this lessons was that because it did end up just being us two, we could really talk about what was happening in the story and he could point things out without being rude to other students. The weaknesses were that he seemed to get bored and when he had an idea he stuck with it, even if the story had already proved that that prediction wasn’t going to be the case. I just wonder how to make it more interesting for students, and it might be if students are in a whole group setting bouncing ideas off of each other, rather than one student out in the hallway and away from the rest of his classmates who are all reading a different story.

DAROS ~ MINI LESSON #1

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF FOCUS STUDENTS

M is a little African American boy in 2^nd grade. He is at a 1^st grade level, however, in reading and writing. He came to FV elementary about half-way through the first semester of class from Flint. He often has difficulty sitting still for long periods of time. He has also been known to quickly give up on an assignment and ask for help when he does know how to accomplish it. Sometimes I wonder if he just wants attention because once you walk over and talk to him about questions he has, he knows to do the assignment. Unfortunately, the day before I did my lesson, M was suspended, so he wasn’t there when I did my mini lessons, I could only do them with J.

J is also a little African American boy in 2^nd grade. He is at a 1^st grade level, however, in reading and writing. He came to FV elementary about half-way through the second semester of class, so I haven’t known him as long as I have known many of the other students. Because he is behind the rest of the class, I have worked with him one on one a few times or with M who is also behind. They have seats in the back of the classroom where they can get differentiated instruction consistently. He likes to walk around a lot and he tries to get out of the classroom by saying he has to go to the bathroom. I did this lesson with only J because M wasn’t there and because he really needed the help.

I know that this lesson was necessary and appropriate for my students because he has a hard time with sounding out words, so I wanted to see if it was because he was trying to read to fast, or if it was because he couldn’t put the sounds of the letters together. With this lesson I was hoping that I will be able to see if he can sound out the words, or if he just guesses altogether.

When I asked my CT what she wanted me to do with my mini-lessons she said that it was completely up to me, so I based them off what I observed in the class and what I thought would be important for my students.

TE 402 READING LESSON PLAN

Daros Reading Lesson Plan # 1

Your Name: Kayla Daros Grade Level: 2^nd/3^rd Split

Date lesson was taught: Wednesday, April, 20, 2011 Number of Students: 1

1). Rationale (What evidence do you have that your focus students need to learn this skill/strategy?):

I know there are a few students who are still working on reading even in the second and third grade. I am hoping that with this lesson, they will get to practice putting the letter sounds together to read more than anything. I know that they know what the words mean when they finally hear them and sound them out, like when they are reading or working on their worksheets, so I want them to practice saying the words without worrying about what the words mean.

2). List which reading skill/strategy is the main focus of your lesson (select ONE area):

-Nonword Reading Test

3). Objective for this lesson (performance, condition, criteria):

Students will read words from flash cards that I show them and pronounce the words based on how they think the words sound based on how they know other words sound and by sounding them out.

4). Materials & supplies needed:

-paper and pen for me to record what they say

-note cards with the nonsense words written on them

5) OUTLINE OF LESSON PLAN (Provide a bulleted list of ideas):

• Introduction to the lesson

-I will tell my student that I am going to have him practice his reading by reading nonsense words. I will tell him that the purpose of the lesson is for him to practice putting sounds together to make words, which will help him with his reading in the future because he will have practice saying random words.

(3 minutes)

• OUTLINE of key events during the lesson

-I will show him note cards with non words on them and will have him read it out loud to me. I will record the way he says them, if he says them with a regular or irregular pronunciation, and if he pronounces them correctly at all.

-Either a regular or an irregular pronunciation is acceptable, i.e. if “jint” is read as rhyming with “lint” it is regular whereas if “jint” is read as rhyming with “pint” it is irregular; “soser” read as “soaser” is regular, rhyming with “loser” is irregular.

-The words he will be tested on are: plood, louble, aund, hausage, wolt, soser, jint, pettuce, hign, kolice, pove, skeady, wamp, dever, cread, biter, slove, islank, fongue, polonel, nowl, narine, swad, kiscuit, chove, duede, sworf, jase, freath, warg, and choiy.

(10 minutes)

• Closing summary for the lesson

-I will close this lesson by reading the words back to the student so that he understands how to say them all and I will tell him his score.

-For 10 year olds, a score below 26 on one-syllable words and 7 on two-syllable words falls significantly below the norm.

-I will ask him how he thinks this might help his reading, and remind him that sounding out words is important for reading. If he doesn’t understand how to say it, sound it out, and if he doesn’t understand what they mean, he should ask someone or look it up.

(5 minutes)

6) Ongoing-Assessment:

I think it will be really interesting to see how he reacts if I don’t tell him right away that they are made-up nonsense words that don’t mean anything. It would be interesting if he ignores that he doesn’t know what any of the words mean or if he catches on right away and says something about them being incorrect. Then I will observe him when he does his work and see if he practices sounding words out, rather than just asking for help right away or continuing on if he doesn’t know what a word means.

7) Based on what you know about your focus students, what Academic, Social and/or Linguistic Support will be needed during the lesson?

He will need to be encouraged to keep going and sound the words out. I will make sure that I don’t make any reference to whether or not he said a word correctly – this way he won’t be discouraged. If he doesn’t know how to say a word I will give him time to sound it out and I will encourage him to think about another word that the nonsense word looks like and use that to help him say the word – most of the words are other words with just the first letter changed.

REFLECTION OF LESSON

Since M wasn’t there I did this lesson with J. He was very interested in participating and doing the lesson, however sometimes he had a hard time focusing and since we were in the hallway, he was distracted by noises and people walking around. My objective was for him to read words from flash cards that I show him and pronounce the words based on how they think the words sound based on how they know other words sound and by sounding them out. He had a hard time with this and really made up words and added letters to the words that weren’t even there. He didn’t know what the words on the card meant but he didn’t say anything about that other than that they were too hard and that he wanted easier words like “cat” and “dog.”

The strengths of the lesson supporting his learning was that in the end when he said he didn’t know what the words meant and I told him that I didn’t either, he understood that if he doesn’t understand a word he should ask what it means. Also I think he got the connection that some words look like other words that he knows so he should use that knowledge to figure out how to say the words based on that. The limitations of the lesson supporting his learning was that he really couldn’t say any of the words. He said 4 of them correct. The interesting thing was he added an /r/ into most of the words and when I went back through them with him again to show him the words, he said them the exact same way, with that /r/ added. When I had him sound them out he said the word slowly and then added the /r/ on quickly at the end even though there was no /r/ there.

As a teacher, I really liked how I ended the lesson. He couldn’t say the words, however, I noticed something about him that other teachers, including my CT, hadn’t noticed or paid any attention to before. When we came to the word dever, he said deber. I, also, ignored it because it had said so many words wrong already, nothing was knew. When we came back to it later, like many of the other words, he said it the same way, deber. Interested, I told him to say van. He said fan. I said no, say Van. He said ban. After a few more minutes of different words, I realized he couldn’t make the /v/ sound with his mouth. Then we came to the word freathy and he said fretter-not only did he add the /r/ at the and but we also discovered that he couldn’t say the /th/ sound either. He said mudder instead of mother, tank instead of thank, and dis instead of this. I brought it up to my teacher and she said she would talk to the speech therapist right away. During lunch she did that and she came back and told me that the speech therapist said that “African American students just talk like that and that we should learn how to understand their Ebonics.” I was very disheartened to hear that coming from a professional woman who works with all kinds of students, but I was proud of my discovery.

Differentiating Instruction - Letter to Parents

Dear Mr. and Mrs. X,

From working with your child, I have learned a lot about him. I am writing to you to explain to you his literacy learning and needs, as well as some ideas I have to enhance M‘s learning.

Overall, I feel that the most beneficial thing to do right now is to differentiate the process of literacy instruction. I feel like M does not need me to modify the content (the “what” of teaching) or the product (end result), as much as he needs a different “how.” I will therefore group students for instruction and choose reading materials at appropriate levels of difficulty. I will also make decisions about involving students in activities that allow them to process what they’re learning through oral, written, or visual means. M really needs to feel comfortable in order to learn. He is very shy and is only just starting to cooperate and work with me. In the past few months, I have found out that more learning seems to take place in a smaller, quieter setting than the whole class. I will be setting up “literacy centers” in the class. These centers will contain meaningful, purposeful literacy activities that students can work at in small groups. In relation to this, I will also have a “quiet corner”, in the back of the room where I will place headphones to drown out noise. M can choose to do his work here any time he would like, if the setting of the whole class becomes overwhelming.

M is still struggling a little in his reading and writing. He is struggling with reading fluency, so I plan to incorporate high-frequency words that he does not yet know into my lessons. I will also allow M to read texts quietly before reading them aloud. Finally, in one of the literacy centers, I will use choral reading in small groups. This should help him feel more comfortable if his is not the only voice. He will also begin to learn from his peers. M really enjoys looking at the pictures in texts, so I will make sure to let him look through a book before reading it, especially since this is a great pre-reading exercise - to predict what might happen in the text. However, M is having a difficult time with comprehension skills. So, in order to help him draw inferences and do higher-level thinking, I will occasionally read books aloud to him instead of having him read it. I will also do think-alouds to model these skills. As a class, we will hold literature discussions about what we read.

I am curious about M’s writing in English, his native language. In the Spanish Immersion Program, we say that all work must be in Spanish, but this is his second language. I plan to do some assessments to gain a better understanding of his writing in English. M has very little motivation to do any writing assignments. Since he often refuses to write, I plan to conference with him to determine and address the problem. I would also like to try to have him write a collaborative composition with a small group or a partner. I will also work to brainstorm ideas with your student during prewriting to hopefully find something engaging and interesting to him. I will be focusing a lot of my writing lessons on sentence structure, capitalization and punctuation, and grammar. I want all of my students to feel comfortable and confident with these components of their writing. We will also be spending a lot of time with proofreading and editing and revising their written works.

I would also like to have frequent conferences with M to see how he is feeling about reading and writing. I will ask questions about what he is learning, what is easy and hard, and what he might want to learn. In working with your child, besides differentiating instruction, I plan to use appropriate instructional materials. I will also push myself to continue to grow professionally in order to expand my expertise and I feel that collaborating with literacy coaches and other teachers is very important as well.

Please contact me if you have any questions or concerns about M’s literacy learning!

Sincerely,
Srta. Williams