Mini-Lesson - Becky

There is one student that I spent a lot of time working with in my kindergarten classroom, Michael. He is one of the best readers in the class and can pick up almost any book and read me all the words. However, I have seen that he has difficulty comprehending what he is reading. This is especially true when I show him words without pictures; sometimes he can’t tell me what a simple word means even though he can read it correctly. When my CT or I read a book to the class, he is able to tell us what happened and the important events in the story. However, when he reads a book by himself, he has difficulty remembering what he just finished reading.

I decided to spend some time one-on-one to work on his comprehension skills. I thought the best way to teach him this was by modeling, specifically a “think aloud”. I planned to show him each step of the comprehension process by stating out loud what I was doing. I began by reading him a story that he had read before. I stopped after each page and did a short summary of everything I had just read. When I came to a word I “didn’t know”, I would say out loud, “I don’t know that word. Let me see if I can figure out what it means by rereading the sentence.” I would also tell him how I was looking at the pictures to see if that could help me. When a new character was introduced, I would say, “Who is this person? How does he (or she) know the other characters?” I would spend some time thinking aloud to answer my own question. When I finished the book, I reiterated all the main points of the story from beginning to end. I also told him my favorite part from the book.

After I was finished, I had him try. Once he knew what was expected of him, his reading slowed down; I could tell that he was paying more attention to what the words meant instead of just reading them. He struggled through the first few pages and was not able to always summarize what he read, but he could tell me what individual words meant. I was most happy to see him stop at a word and say “I don’t know that word. I’ll read the sentence again to figure it out.” After he read the sentence again, he used context clues to correctly identify its meaning. After he finished reading, he was able to tell me most of the main events from the story.

I plan on working with him again this week to see if he will use the same strategies while he reads. I’m hoping that with more practice, these strategies will become second nature and he won’t have to think about them as he reads. However, in the mean time, I hope that he will continue to use them to be able to comprehend everything he reads, or at least spend some time trying.