Harris Reading Lesson Overview

Student P has a hard time understanding/using the English language. She is very bright in all subjects but struggles with writing. She needs help to understand how to make her writing more detailed and understandable to a reader.  Student D is good at putting stories together, but lacks great detail and has the ability to improve his writing if he understood how to improve it and gained the skills necessary to improve his writing.

The target area in the first lesson is to help students understand how to use details in writing and improve their stories and writing skills. In student P's case, my CT believes that she may have a language barrier at home and is having a hard time understanding how to write any differently than she already is because she has not improved in a great while. However, to my understanding she is not a part of an ESL class at the school. My CT believes that student D is ready to move on to more detailed writing.  

For my second lesson, the target area is recognizing and producing rhyming words.  This target area is appropriate for the students because they have both shown trouble recognizing words that rhyme with one another during daily five reading.   

In Tompkins chapter 7 there is a section that talks about word consciousness. This section was what led me to teach about descriptive language, because being aware of language and vocabulary in general is necessary for students at a young age.  This lesson helped students to use certain words skillfully and to gain an appreciation and better understand of these words to help them in their future writing and story telling assignments throughout school. In Tompkins chapter 5 there are sound-matching activities.  This is what led me to find the second literacy activity about rhyming words. It sounded like a fun way to work with rhyming words and to keep kids engaged.