Mini Lessons

Every Wednesday at 9:30 I work with a small group of strategic intervention (S.I) leveled 4th graders. They are given a small narrative or informative text to read. Usually they are about 15-20 pages. All the books are educational in some way, usually related to science or social studies. In these small groups, I have each student take turns reading out loud and as we go through the book, I stop and ask comprehensive questions to make sure the students are intaking what they are reading.

Mini Lesson one: Vocabulary.
At the beginning of the book, there is a list of vocabulary words. I have each student explain in their own words what they think the word means. We discuss prefixes, and suffixes to help us to define the word. The biggest challenge for the kids is to not use the vocab word when defining it. I then have them use it in a sentence.
As we begin to read, when we get to one of the vocabulary words, I have the student re read the sentence and we discuss if our definition was correct or in correct. One of the words was present. The students initially defined it as a gift. But as we read on, we found that the word meant that someone was in attendance. When we read the sentence, I asked the students if their definition was right. They replied no. I asked them what they thought the definition was based on context clues and they told me that it meant the character was at the scene. Many of the other vocab words were similar to this one. There was a lot of discussion on how we know that words can look and sound the same but have different meaning and that's why it's important to read the context clues. At the end of the reading, we go back through the definitions and redefine the words. The students write down their definitions in their writing journals.

Lesson 2: Fluency Lesson with one focus student
One of the students I work with the most is probably the lowest reader in 4th grade. I believe he is at a 2nd grade reading level which, believe it or not, is a great improvement from when he started at the beginning of the school year. Together, we worked on his Fluency. The focus of my lesson was for him to stop and put inflictions at the proper times for punctuation such as periods, question marks, exclamation points, commas and dashes. To start the lesson, I had him read two sentences that I made up. The first sentence was a regular sentence without any commas, just a period. The second sentence had a list of items which has commas to separate them and an exclamation point on the end. I had him read both sentences. I then demonstrated how to read it with the proper stops and inflictions and had him read it once more. I then explained to him that as we read our book, he would need to focus on these things. If he started running two distinct sentences together, he would need to re read it. If he had to be stopped many times on that page, I would ask him if he understood what he just read and if he didn't, we'd read it again. The second time always went much more smooth than the first. Since the book was short, after we finish it, I have him read it again; still focusing on reading fluently.

I'm not sure if what I'm doing it benefiting these students all that much since I'm only meeting with them once a week for 30 minutes or so but it seems to help them at the time. Hopefully this is helping them improve their skills.