Mini Lesson 1: For my first lesson I worked with one of the first grade girls in my class. The students are all doing Reading Street and this particular student really struggles with comprehension. For the lesson I sat with the student and had her first read a book to herself and then read it aloud to me. After the student had finished reading I asked her if she could tell me in her own words what the book was about. She gave me a very brief summary saying the book was about a girl and a garden. I then gave the student a worksheet my CT had made that required her to answer questions about the text. Upon reading the first question the student said she couldn’t remember the answer but I explained that she could look back through the book to find the answer. The student did this and as she found the first answer I asked her question such as “without looking do you remember what happened next?” as the student flipped back through the book and talked out her answers she seemed to gain a better grasp on what the book was actually about. However I am not sure that she will be motivated to do that again when she is working on her own.
Mini Lesson 2: For my second Mini Lesson I worked with three first grade students on sentence structure. These students have been struggling to remember that they need to start a sentence with an upper-case letter, end with a period, have spacing between letters, have proper letter formation, and correct spelling. As of right now the important three my CT really want them to focus on are capitalization, punctuation, and spacing. To help them work on this I did an activity with them where they were each given a star, on each arm of the star we wrote one of the aspects of a star sentence. I then worked with the students and we made an example that highlighted each aspect. When we were finished I laminated their stars and gave them to the students as reminders for when they are writing. I think this activity did help the students, it gave them practice working on each of the parts of a star sentence, and they enjoyed making the stars and getting to keep them.
I also did a mini lesson on comprehension because I see a few students really struggling with it in my classroom. I have found that "picture walks" prior to them actually reading the text sometimes help strengthen the students understanding of what they have read. The picture walk is a tool that I picked up from my CT last year where the student just flips through the pages and focuses only on the pictures to determine what the story could be about. I find that when I ask my students about what happened in the book, they also tend to forget or will only mention the very last thing that happened in the book. I don't know if maybe stopping them during the reading to have them reflect or make a connection might produce a better understanding, but it is something that could be experimented with.
ReplyDelete