Kusek_ReadingLessonOverview

My Mentor Teacher was thrilled when I told her of our last assignment for the ELA portion of TE402. She is always trying to use me as much as possible when I am there, specifically to work with individual students in areas that they are struggling in. I have pulled many students out in the hall to work on their multiplication tables, as well as others to work on reading fluency. The number one concern of my MT is probably the reading comprehension of two of the students in class.

My classroom is a 3rd/4th grade Spanish immersion split class, but two students stand out against the whole class in regards to reading comprehension. My MT has DRA tested all of the students, and all but two are reading above or at least on their grade level. Louis* is a fourth grader and Trevor* is a third grader, but both are reading at about a second grade level in both Spanish and English. Their accuracy in fluency has been improving, but both students really struggle with comprehension. They cannot retell what happened in a story they just read or answer comprehension questions in much detail. My MT is concerned that they are falling even farther behind in Spanish in comparison to English. She has noticed that Louis gets really distracted easily and zones out during a reading, whether it is an all class reading or if it is reading by himself. Trevor, on the other hand, seems to be in his own world much of the time, as he rarely participates in class and seems to be in a shell of sorts.

I will be working with these two students for both of the reading lessons. We will be focusing on comprehension both times. Comprehension is an extremely important factor in literacy development. If a reader doesn't comprehend what they just read, then there is no point in reading. In addition, Thompson explains that there are many factors that go into reading comprehension. The factors he mentioned includes "background knowledge, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension strategies, comprehension skills, motivation, genres, text structures and text features" (Thompson, p259) This is a large area of literacy development to work on, so I will do the best I can in focusing in on a couple skills and strategies to help equip the boys.

While comprehension includes both reader and text factors, I will focus on reader factors. My teacher wants me to use Spanish non-fiction books. I don't have much influence on motivation or text factors here, so I will focus on a couple different comprehension strategies. The first lesson will focus on what Thompson calls a "double-entry journal" (Thompson, p256), relating to the comprehension strategy of "connecting" (p273). We will read a book together and I will have the boys fill out this journal throughout the reading. The second lesson will focus on "questioning" (p273). I will have the boys read another book and they will be required to ask questions before reading, during reading, and we will work through the answers together. I want this lesson to also have an emphasis on questioning vocabulary, since Thompson states that vocabulary comprehension is important to overall comprehension (p260). Both of these strategies have to do with responding to the text, which is something that my MT sees doesn't happen when Louis and Trevor read a book.