McLean Reading Lesson Overview

·       Discuss the target areas you have chosen for your lessons, and how you know your target areas are appropriate for these learners’ needs. You will need to access any assessments completed by you or your MT that help you understand the focus students’ learning needs and talk with your MT about appropriate strategies to use to support the focus students’ learning.

o    The target areas that I have chosen for my students are phonemic awareness and phonics.  These are both emergent literacy skills and can be found in Tompkins chapters 4-5.  My head teacher informed me that my focus students need extra help in these two areas.  One student in particular needs extra help here because he came late into Kindergarten and barley knew the names of the letters in the alphabet.  As you can imagine, he needs extra help coming up to speed with the Kindergarten standards.  As a result, he is one of my largest focuses during this lesson.  Other students need help with these areas and would benefit from one-on-one instruction.  I know that these target areas are appropriate for my students needs because my head teacher has done many assessments on my focus group of students.  She has been doing verbal assessments and written work sample assessments that she has shown me.  In specific, she has noticed that these students have trouble sounding out simple words, as well as blending words together.  They also have trouble recognizing the first sound in a word and understanding how changing this sound contributes to the meaning of the word.  For this reason, I am working on phonics and phonemic awareness activities with these children. 

·       Read at least one of the articles listed on our course schedule (March 25) (also listed on the back of this sheet) to assist you in selecting an appropriate focus and instructional strategy for each lesson.

o    There are several instructional strategies that one can use when teaching phonics and phonemic awareness.  However, I wanted to narrow my focus and teach these subjects as a center during literacy centers.  This is the most effective use of time, as my mentor teacher and I discussed.  As a result, I will be teaching a phonics literacy center one day and a phonemic awareness literacy center another day.  In my lesson on phonics, I will be playing a matching game that allows students to engage in discussion about the rhymes or phonic sounds in words.  I read the article, “Orientation to a New Book: More Than a Picture Walk” by Connie Briggs.  Although I am not engaging students in a reading lesson and furthering their comprehension strategies by encouraging students to “read” the pictures, the students engaging in my center activity will be using pictures to have a further understanding of the information.  The children engaging in the phonics activity will have to look at the picture cue to help them sound the word to determine if the words rhyme.  In addition, the children at the phonemic awareness center will be engaging in an activity that requires them to draw a picture referring to the word that they create.  In this way, they are using pictures to take control of their own learning and activate their piror knowledge, and therefore create motivation.  This is the type of strategy that I read about in this article, as well as learned from talking to my head teacher about, that I will be using in my activity center plans.