For one of my mini lessons in my placement classroom I worked with a group of 4 students during their reading time. I read a book with them about bridges. It was a short informational chapter book with several real photos and facts about specific bridges. I used the comprehension strategy of KWL with this small group of students. This specific group of students was the higher-level reading group. These students were in my Watson’s Go to Birmingham group also so I was very familiar with their abilities and therefore used a lot of the adaptations from my literacy lesson plan. We completed a group KWL chart instead of individually because the students had never been exposed to this chart before. Before we read, the students struggled a little to think of fact for the K column, things they already knew on the topic (bridges). They had a few comments about bridges that they wanted to put in this column such as “there are many different kinds, there is a bridge called the Mackinaw Bridge in Michigan, and there are bridges all around us”. They briefly flipped through the book a little and looked at the pictures. Some things they said they wanted to know included a lot about the construction of bridges such as, “how do they make bridges over water, how long does it take to build a big bridge, what different kinds are there, and what is the biggest/longest bridge in the world”. After reading the book we then filled in the L column, what they learned. They all had a lot to add to this column and were excited to share the facts they had learned and each student contributed at least 2 facts in this column. They even included the vocabulary words from the book such as “truss, aqueduct, suspension bridge, arch bridge, and beam bridge”. I think this technique was very beneficial for these students and it helped to organize their thoughts on the topic and made the reading more meaningful. Because bridges are not a topic the students thought they needed to necessarily know, by completing this chart it allowed students to see that you can practice reading and comprehension with any book. I would definitely use this technique with these students again. Reading this book was supposed to help them with fluency and decoding, however by using KWL it encompassed another reading strategy that students can use in years to come.
For my second mini lesson I worked with one student on scaffolding vocabulary learning. I decided to do this after my Watson’s Go to Birmingham book club because I had read about it in the Scott article (called Scaffolding Vocabulary Learning). Right after I had read this article I had wished I used some of these techniques with my group. I decided to chose one of my students from the group and revisit some vocabulary and use the solution the article suggests of “building links”. I really loved the idea of using a concept map to make these links and I know that concept maps are very helpful for me personally to organize ideas and make connections. I decided to use the vocabulary word “racism” (just like the example in the article) because we had discussed similar terms briefly before reading the book and never revisited them. The student struggled a little to get started and said he had never done a concept map before. As we talked through it he ended up really enjoying it. The first thing he wrote was “church bombing” because it was what we had discussed recently in regards to this topic from our book club book. He then went on to add, “Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, boycotts, hate, blacks and whites, marches, because of color you don’t like someone, protests, civil rights movement, segregation, separate schools for blacks and whites, and 1963”. I helped him and scaffolding him to get him to remember some of these from our previous discussion before we read the book, however I was shocked with how well he did. He included a lot of ideas from the book, but also included other things he has learned this year that are related. He said he really liked this activity and I think it really helped him to see these connections directly made, and to see how it all fit together. Because I personally see great benefits from concept maps I think I will definitely use this technique in the future whether it is as a whole class, small groups, or individually. I think by building these links students are able to grasp the meaning of vocabulary words much more than they would if you simply read, wrote, and memorized the definition.
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