Joel's Reading Lesson Plan #1

Reading Lesson Plan # 1

Your Name: Joel Cross Grade Level: 5th

Date lesson was taught: 3/16/11 Number of Students: 2

1) Rationale: My classroom uses the Reading Street basal series for Language Arts. My CT has been told that she needs to use is ‘with fidelity’. The topic of the lesson wasn’t up to me because of this. She identified two students who are struggling with pulling a main idea out of a paragraph and asked me to work with them.

2) List which reading skill/strategy is the main focus of your lesson: This is a comprehension strategy. Specifically it is summarizing.

3) Objective for this lesson: When read a sentence from the book Westlandia, students will be able to find the sentence and use the passage it is in to write down the topic sentence of that passage.

4) Materials & supplies needed: Textbook with Westlandia story, pencil, paper, selection of sentences.

5) OUTLINE OF LESSON PLAN:

• Introduction to the lesson I will remind the students that they are working on summarizing the main ideas of a short passage. The author often does this by including a topic sentence in the paragraph and then expanding on it. We are going to try to find the topic sentences in the paragraphs. I will then use the first sentence to model how this works. The first sentence is “Wesley didn’t like pizza.” The rest of the passage goes on to detail other things that are a little weird about him. I will show him that this can be connected to the topic sentence in the paragraph that reads “Wesley was different from other boys.” (5 minutes)

• OUTLINE of key events during the lesson There are only 20 minutes that are to be set aside for this lesson. I want to give the students as many times to practice this skill as possible. After modeling the first one for them I will gradually withdraw my scaffolding as we work through the sentences. In the next sentence I give them I will ask one of the students to read the paragraph out loud to me when he has found the sentence. I will then pose the question “Does anyone see a sentence that tells about everything in the passage?” If I get no response I will work through sentences in the paragraph one by one and ask “Does this summarize the paragraph?” We will then discuss why it does or does not meet that criteria. Hopefully after working through a few in this manner I can have the students do a few sentences on their own. After we work through each sentence I will have the students write down the topic sentence. (15 minutes)

• Closing summary for the lesson When we run out of time for the activity I will remind the students that the purpose of the lesson is to see how an author writes a topic sentence and then expands on that sentence to create a story. We can usually find the main idea of this story and use it to help us summarize it if we can find the topic sentence. (1 minute)

6) Ongoing-Assessment: I will know if students are progressing toward my objective if they are able to identify the topic sentences more accurately, with more speed, and with less help. I will be looking for the time it takes the students to find a sentence that they think is the topic sentence, how accurate they are in their attempts, and how much they looked to me for clues. I will know they can accomplish this task if they can identify three topic sentences in a row without help from me.

7) Based on what you know about your focus students, what Academic, Social and/or Linguistic Support will be needed during the lesson?

I know that “R” has a problem with stuttering at times and he doesn’t always like to read aloud. I will encourage him by asking him to read the paragraph, but if he seems uncomfortable I will read it for him. The point of the lesson is not to increase fluency or prosody right now so this won’t matter. These students are also struggling with their comprehension so I know I will have to provide more scaffolding for them. If I don’t reach the end point of my lesson where the students are working through on their own that is okay. If I were really teaching in the classroom I would continue to work on this skill with them.