This was our last session together, so I decided to read a fun story. Dylan had never heard of it, and it was a great vehicle to discuss the idea of asking questions about the story while reading. I've stressed looking at things from all perspectives all year with Dylan, and I think he's gotten a lot out of it.
Dylan finally had a paper I could look over, and we had a good discussion about constructive criticism and some things he could have done to improve his paper. We then turned our focus to the short story "The Foghorn", in which Dylan was excellent as usual.
Stephen began his session with a PowerPoint lesson on the inner planets. Stephen was able to read through the many slides about Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars and discuss the facts presented about each one. He successfully compared and contrasted many different aspects of Mercury and Venus as well as Earth and Mars. Stephen did a great job reading the facts on each one of the slides and during the lesson, we touched on some phonics rules to help his decoding skills. After working through the PowerPoint lesson, we went onto YouTube and listened to several songs about the eight planets of the solar system. Stephen was thrilled to listen to the songs and continued to learn planetary facts about the solar system through music.
To reinforce Josh's grammar consciousness, I went over the difference between complete sentences and sentence fragments with him in this lesson. After providing an overview of both, I had Josh define the terms for himself and give me an example of each. Josh clearly understood the difference between sentences and fragments, so we moved on to Exercise A in our grammar text. Josh and I worked together to find the sentence fragments, but on this first set, Josh had some difficulty, especially with fragments that had a subject and a verb, but were missing information to make them complete sentences. To help, I told Josh that if he can "fill in the blanks," then the sentence was not complete. This seemed to aid him a lot, and he excelled in the next two exercises. Josh is such a hard worker!
Today, I had Josh read and answer several FCAT based questions and passages. The first passage was "Night" from Elie Wiesel, and Josh had to infer from the passage the setting, time period, and characters. This he did with little trouble, but he needed a bit of help to stay focused. Once redirected, however, Josh was able to catch himself getting off track, and we struck a deal that he could express any extra thoughts at the end of the discussion. The next passage was "Hercules," and Josh seemed to enjoy its content thoroughly. Josh did very well on both passages, answering 4/5 questions correctly on each passage. We need to work on Josh mixing-up some of the details from the passage, but I was very pleased with how he performed on this exercise.
Predicting outcomes, number sense, and text features
Lesson Outline
Ashley began her session by playing a reading comprehension game called Predicting Outcomes: Western Frontier. Players of the game take to the trails and must be ready to predict what might happen by reading passages and making predictions. Ashley did a fantastic job reading the comprehension passages, applying her background knowledge to different situations, searching for context clues and predicting the correct outcomes. After successfully completing the game, we switched gears and played a math game called What's My Number. This game has an interactive game board. As players read questions from the cards - they flick down numbers on the game board to best predict their opponent's number. The game is useful for a visual demonstration of number patterns, operations, counting, finding missing numbers, and greater than/less than concepts. Ashley absolutely loved the game and did an amazing job with the different math concepts. We concluded the session, by reading a nonfiction book called Bears. Ashley looked through the different text features and learned about how they help readers navigate through books. She also enjoyed learning interesting facts about bears.
We read a new short story today, and I continue to be impressed with Dylan's comprehension and retention. If he just slowed down his reading a bit, I think he would be able to get even more out of it. We finished the story and had a great conversation about the morality of the finish.
Bobby and I read many poems by Shel Silverstein. We discussed basic elements of poetry and he used the illustrations to predict what may be happening in the poem. We discussed real and nonsense words, and how poems can rhyme or not rhyme. Bobby also decided that he wants to read the first Harry Potter book. We took turns reading, we discused the inferences that could be made based on the context clues. He made predictions about what was happening in the story, and we talked about how the movie is actually much different, as there are many more exciting details in the story.
Today we read the short story, The Monkey's Paw. Dylan had read a book of poems based on the short story, but had never read the original story itself. We spent some time talking about the concept of fate, and the purpose behind the curse. As usual, his reading was excellent, but the real reason I chose this story was to ascertain how often he looks up words he doesn't know. There was a lot of choice vocabulary in the story, and Dylan has a tendency to assume he knows a the meaning of a word based on its context. He needs to make more of an effort to keep building his vocabulary when reading.
