Alan is interested in tetherball, soccer and ping-pong. His scientific mind embraces future potential writing topics of liquid, solid and gas, water vapor, salinity, and the life cycle of insects. He willingly embraced new reading content of electricty and magnetism while showing joyful expression and a sense of humor in his writing.
Alan is a curious, self-motivated reader and a pleasure to collaborate with. Scoring at a 65-70 percentile with his oral reading fluency, Alan is on target for where he should be during the beginning of the winter trimester. Alan performed with 97% accuracy on the fluency scale at 4th grade level for words correct per minute. Strong suits: reading motivation, fluency and decoding for meaning.
Occasionally, Alan misses critical details of the story. While Alan reads at a steady pace with efficiency and three-four word phrase groups, there is room for improvement in comprehension. Alan should continue to read 4th level material while focusing on gaining strategies for comprehension. He can benefit from reading more carefully and asking questions along the way to more fully capture details of the main idea.
As a result of this knowledge, what learning objectives and materials are you considering using for your lesson?
A reading lesson for Alan will focus on teaching a strategy for recognizing main ideas with the purpose of summarizing a challenging work of non-fiction. In addition, scoring well into a 5th grade frustration level, shows that Alan can move beyond common word use to work with new vocabulary and more challenging text. Importantly, laying the groundwork of prior knowledge within the context of interdisciplinary instruction (his intrinsic motivation is Science) can guide toward greater engagement, ownership and comprehension.
The process for this lesson includes creating an “I wonder” poem to preload for conceptual understanding of doing what good readers do — asking questions. Modeling, I will read a short passage, and think aloud as I ask predictive questions. Following this exercise, together we will read a grade level text while placing sticky notes and writing Alan’s questions in the margins. Materials: journal notebook for poem, pencil, grade level text (2 copies), question prompts on cards, sticky notes.
