Mini-Lesson: Kelcie Ebbitt

In my placement my CT and the two other 3rd/4th grade have created groups of their highest need students and I work with them for about twenty minutes each Wednesday morning. These students are considered a part of the Strategic Intervention group and are given extra attention for comprehension and fluency. Each Wednesday we read a different book, and I make sure that I have read it before the students. The students really struggle with pace, so that is a major focus of mine.

One of the strategies I try and employ is starting off by discussing as a group what we do with punctuation, at the end of paragraphs, and what parts of the book we read aloud and to ourselves. The students run through the reading as fast as they possibly can and were really having difficulty with punctuation. After we started going over as a group what we are supposed to with punctuation the students were obviously much better; it was a nice reminder for them to pause and read at a comprehensible pace. I have seen great progress with them over the past six weeks when it comes to punctuation.

The other aspect of their reading that I really chose to focus on was vocabulary. The leveled readers they are using all cover different topics from science to fantasy. The vocabulary is varied, and often trips the students up as they read. In the beginning the students would say words they didn't know very quickly and then move on without any understanding of what the word really is. After I realized this, I let the students know if they didn't know a word they should pause and try and sound it out. If they really struggled I would help them, but the student would have to at least re-read the word and sometimes the entire sentence. When the students understood that we would not be 'skipping' words by mumbling through them, they were much more confident and tried a lot harder to read every word without my help.

The progress of the students is great. I of course only see them four twenty minutes one day a week so by no means see all the work the teachers are putting in with these students, but clearly they are working incredibly hard. It is wonderful to see the students try hard when I am watching, I just hope that my strategies such as using context words to help them understand the word they are struggling with, and reading punctuation with emphasis until it is wrote memory will help them as they read on their own.