Today another student was added to my literacy group so from now on I will be working with five students instead of four. They are all girls and seemed to get along fine together when working in the group with me. The only bad thing about having a new student added during week two is that she missed doing the student interest inventory and pre-assessment that I did with the other four students last week. This means I do not know as much about this girl as I do the other students, however from what I gathered today from the activities we did together, she seems like she has a lot of potential to do well in literacy.
My group of students, all girls mind you, are still very obsessed with Robert Paterson (or anything Twilight) and Justin Bieber so I still had to enforce the rule that I made up last week that any activity that we do whether it be written or verbal cannot involve any of those people. I want them to realize that there is more cool things in life than just Justin Bieber and Twilight and they can discover this through reading and writing. I will continue to enforce this rule throughout the remaining weeks that I spend with them.
Today we focused on understanding how to summarize. I started by reading the students the traditional story of The Gingerbread Man. At first they looked at me funny and said "How old do you think we are" but then once I explained to them what today's lesson was about and that they needed to explain to me what the book was about after we read it, they realized why I started the lesson off with an easy book. Then I had the students do a writing activity where each person started a story off with an opening sentence. Then they passed their paper to the person sitting next to them and that person wrote the next sentence. We continued this process for a while and eventually the original author of the story got to write the final sentence. Then I read each story aloud since I figured the students would have a hard time reading each others handwriting. After reading each story one at a time, I asked the students to provide a verbal summary of what the story was about. The challenge I gave them was to create a summary that was 16 words or less. We used our fingers to make sure someone did not say more than 16 words. This was a successful activity.
Now that the students had the chance to learn about what a summary was and to try and create one in 16 words or less I read one last passage to them and then asked them to individually write a summary of the passage. It was about a blue snowman. I am using the students' written summaries to assess their understanding of what a summary is and whether or not they can make one in 16 words or less.
Today's activities helped me realize that the children seem more interested in doing writing activities if they are creative such as the stories we wrote today each taking turns writing a sentence. They do not like to just write for no purpose. I will keep this in mind as I plan future lessons. I also found that they do not mind doing activities that involve reading, however they like to be involved in the reading as opposed to being read to. I tend to do a reading activity with them where I make each student read part of the book or passage. They take turns reading paragraphs. This is something I will also keep in mind as I plan my future lessons to do with the students.
No comments:
Post a Comment