Week 4: November 3, 2008

This week we worked on a book called Lets Talk About Games. We decided to do group work with the three students for the first part. Each student did a picture walk through the book writing a "I wonder.....because..." which is something they have previously used in class with other stories. They then each read aloud their I wonders. My student wrote " I wonder If they have deifdien Games and dad are The people Go to play They because on the fat page p". What she read was "I wonder if they have different games and the people play them because of the picture on the first page". Again this shows that we have to work on familiar sounds in words and sounding out words. If she had not read the "I wonder..." it would have nearly impossible to figure out what she wanted to say. After the "I wonder...because..." we did vocab with large paper taped to the wall. The five words we decided to focus on were dribble, tackle, puck, pitcher and leather. First we asked them if they knew what the words were then wrote the definition on the paper and lastly had them make sentences using the word. For the most part they knew the words, except for leather. Being the words are associated with sports I think they sounded familar to them.

After the vocab we broke up to do our reading records one-on-one. I had my student read a total of 114 words (first 4 pages) of Lets Talk About Games. She had a 1:10 error rate, a 1:7 self correction rate and 89% accuracy. Although the accuracy states that the book may be too difficult for her I believe it is at her level and we will work on it in the upcoming weeks. Most of her mistakes are words that she substituted rather then even trying and sounding out the words. With help decoding words and sounding out words I think the accuracy rate will increase over the upcoming weeks. Next week we will read the rest of the story and work on comprehension. She will have to summarize the book orally and written.

The next lesson was a class lesson-->Push-in-Program--> where the reading resource teacher came to the class to teach about writing paragraphs. The students were told about topic sentences, detail sentences and then closing sentences. Afterwards the students were given a worksheet on writing a paragraph and then actually wrote a paragraph in their reader response notebooks.

Before lunch Ms. Abdu-Shakur talked about election day. The students gathered on the rug in the back where they did a picture walk of a book called Grace For President. The students were asked "what is happening tomorrow that is really special and important"? "Who are the candidates"? "Which one is the democrat and the republican"? Since lunch was coming up Ms. Abdu-Shakur said she would read the book after they got back but she asked the students what the genre of the book was and how old they thought you had to be to run for President. She explained that since the girl on the cover looked to be a kid she was not old enough to run and the book was thus Fiction.