The Crowd: Reading Lesson Overview

For my upcoming reading mini-lessons, my MT and I chose 3 students who would benefit from some additional instruction:

Katie - Katie is a first grader whose constant smile tells me that she likes school.  She has many friends in class, and likes working in pairs.  No Spanish is spoken in her home.

Zack - Zack is also a first grader, and he asks a lot of questions to expand his thinking.  He is incredibly well-behaved and often gets complimented in front of the classroom for his good behavior.  No Spanish is spoken in his home.

James - James is a first grader who likes interacting with the boys in class, especially his twin brother.  He is confident of his academic ability, and rarely gets frustrated in class.  No Spanish is spoken in his home.

I decided to pick these three students because they all share a few things in common: they do not hear Spanish being spoken or read in their homes, they are in first grade, and they struggle with prosody.  I conducted an informal preassessment, which involved my walking around the room and listening to these three students read aloud.  They are what Tompkins calls “dysfluent readers,” reading “slowly,” reading “without expression” and reading “in a word-by-word manner” (208).  Despite the fact that the books they choose to read out of their book boxes are very familiar to them, and they have read them several times, they still approach each word syllable-by-syllable, and do not have a flowing tone when reading a single page or two.  Because each Spanish letter is assigned one sound (how lucky!), my students have syllabic analysis completely down, and “break a multisyllabic word into syllables and then use their knowledge of phonics and phonograms to decode the word, syllable by syllable” (Tompkins, 197).  They do, however, attack these words very slowly.
Their reading is choppy, and they struggle to understand what they have said by the time they get to the end of the sentence.  For this reason, I would like to teach these students two mini-lessons on fluency, and what it means to read with prosody.  I will specifically focus upon Tompkins’ areas  in which they struggle: reading slowly, without expression, and in a word-by-word manner.

I talked with my MT, and she agreed that these students would benefit from a lesson in prosody, agreeing with my observations of their sounding-out the words by syllable, and reading out loud in a way that would be hard for a peer to understand.  We believe that modeling what prosody sounds like, allowing students to practice with a familiar passage, and then having students attempt prosody with an unfamiliar passage will be a good way to expose them to reading with more fluency.