Mini Lesson Reflection

For my mini lesson, I chose to work with three of my lower-level second grade students. The three students that I chose are three girls who I have noticed throughout the year have struggled in reading in particular, but also could use some extra assisted writing time. Each of these students I have worked one on one with throughout the year and have realized that comprehension is an area of difficulty. Since comprehension is such a large component of the literacy framework I think that is crucial that these students improve on their skills. I have also found that these students have a low fluency when reading and I think that is a big contributer to their comprehension. I wanted to design a lesson that would not only work on their fluency but also give them strategies to improve their comprehension of any given text. I chose a story that I thought my students would enjoy reading, Fancy Nancy by Jane O'Connor. This is a fun, girly book that uses some larger vocabulary words. Since it does it use words that are not sight words for my students it provided me an opportunity to see what the students thought these words meant by looking at the context. This is a great way for the students to work on decoding (even though that was not my main focus).

For my lesson the three students and myself sat in the hallway. I explained to the students that they would be taking turns "playing teacher." From free time in the class I have noticed that these students like to pretend to be teacher and write on the chalkboard and ask each other math questions etc. So I thought this would make the lesson more interesting and fun for the students. Each student would had an opportunity to read aloud a few pages of the text. When reading aloud I asked the students to show the pictures, use their finger to follow along, and using voice inflections. After that particular student was done reading I had her summarize what she just read. This allowed me to see how much she comprehended from her own reading. I then asked the group to share predictions on what they thought would happen next. Each of the girls did an excellent job completing this task. They were very enthusiastic to read and summarize. I found that when the students used their finger to follow along there were far few errors in reading, which made the reading more fluent. I also found that by breaking the book into smaller chunks each of the students had a better idea of what was being read and did a better job comprehending the story. One of the students, Sarah*, is the only one that I felt had difficulty explaining what she had just read. She was able to give a few of the main points but did get distracted to give a full summary. She went off on tangents about other stories she has read. This was important for me to recognize because it demonstrates that she is making connections. Sarah is also the weakest reader of the group. She has difficulty decoding and has a very low fluency. I think these two areas make it difficult for her to truly comprehend what she is reading because she loses meaning in the sentences.

After the reading I asked the students to write a short paragraph describing their favorite part of the story. I asked them to be as descriptive as possible so that someone who has never read this story could make a mental picture. This task was to see how much the students remembered and will also force them to be detailed. The students did an excellent job in their writing. I found that they were able to describe a scene clearly and used settings, characters, and details.

Overall, I was pleased with how my lesson went. I felt that the students enjoyed working with me and took away some tools to help them comprehend. I think that my students benefitted having some extra one on one time and working on reading and writing. If I were to do a follow up lesson I would work with them further on decoding and fluency. I think that they took away some tools to improve on comprehension but I think they would also benefit from tools to help decoding. In terms of fluency, I think having them use their finger helped but they could use some more work on sight words.