Preston Guided Reading Lesson Overview

For my two guided reading lessons I will work with a group of four boys in my kindergarten classroom.  These students were selected by my mentor teacher because they scored low on the informal reading assessment that my teacher implemented a couple weeks ago before parent teacher conferences.  When I talked to my mentor teacher about what specific skills these students needed to work on she said using context clues to figure out unfamiliar words and blending sounds together to make words.

Kenny, Joseph, Javier, and Omar are all five year old students who scored low in phonemic awareness and vocabulary.  Throughout the year I have worked with these students individually during literacy centers.  I have noticed that these children all have a tendency to guess words when they are reading.  The only context clue that they use when they are guessing is the picture on the page.  For example, if there is a picture of a hen and the word "hen" is written below it, the students will instantly guess chicken (thinking it is a picture of a chicken).  When working with these students I encourage them to read the letters on the page and not just guess.  Even if they are successfully able to sound out each individual letter they struggle with being able to blend the individual sounds together to make a word.  I want to work with these students on how to use multiple context clues, such as the letters in the words and the illustrations to figure out unfamiliar words.  In addition I want to work with the students on segmenting and blending sounds in words to further support their developing phonemic awareness.  This is a fundamental skill for student to be able to "read" unfamiliar words (Tompkins, p. 155). 

For my first lesson I will focus on using context clues to figure out unfamiliar words.  Different types of context clues that readers use include using grammar, illustrations, and thinking of what word would logically fit into the  the given sentence.  According to Tompkins, doing a “think-aloud” to modeling strategies on how to use context clues to figure out unknown words is very beneficial when teaching students this skills to children (Tompkins, p. 245).  For the second  lesson I will focus on building the students phonemic awareness.  Phonemic awareness focuses on two main strategies; segmenting and blending.  The students I will be working with students are able to segment words into individual sounds when decoding words but have difficulty blending sounds the sounds together.  Instead of blending the sounds together the students attempt to guess the word, often guessing words with no phonics relation.  According to Tompkins, phonemic awareness requires students to focus on the linguistic features of speech rather than the meaning of each word (Tompkins, p.147).  I am excited to implement these two lessons and teach these four students reading strategies that will help them become more independent readers. 

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