Grace began her session by discussing the difference between fiction and non-fiction books. I taught her my trick for remembering - fiction and fake begin with the same letter so those are the same. We practiced with several books in the classroom and Grace was very excited. Grace then read a non-fiction book called, Hanukkah. She loved discussing all of the details and illustrations. After our reading about Hanukkah, Grace worked on CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words. We used laminated cards with words and a dry erase marker to practice writing and decoding. Grace did very well with the concept. She is becoming more and more confident with her sounds and decoding unfamiliar words. To end our time together, we went to the computer lab and worked in the Raz Kids program to build reading comprehension and fluency. Grace really enjoys reading the Raz Kids books and does very well with the comprehension quizzes.
Dylan is doing a great job with this book. His attention to characters, plot and setting is excellent, and he's doing a great job with the bigger themes of the book. I'm very pleased with his effort.
Josh and I went over our previous discussion about words and connotations. Afterwards, we spent some time reading and discussing the themes in the narrative "Turning Japanese" by Heidi Juliavits. I asked Josh to relay some information about our narrator based on specific instances from the text, and he did a very good job of coming up with ideas, but needed lots of support from the text itself. I am trying to wean Josh off of his reliance on the text to answer questions about characters, teaching him instead how to use the text to draw his own conclusions about the message, speaker, etc.
I was really impressed by how well Dylan read and remembered the two chapters from our last session three weeks ago. He was a little fuzzy, but overall had a solid understanding of the characters and story.
Poems, Rhyming Words, Reading Fluency and Comprehension
Lesson Outline
Grace and I began the session by reading several Jack Prelutsky Thanksgiving poems. The poems were quite humorous and Grace got a real kick out of them. We looked at each poem to find the rhyming words and compared the endings of each word. We looked at how some words rhyme with the same letter combination (jam, yam) and how some words rhyme and are spelled completely different (two, you.) After the poems, we went to the computer lab and read on the Raz Kids reading program. Grace has shown wonderful improvement in both her decoding skills and her reading comprehension. We ended the session by playing a word building dominoes game. Grace put dominoes together and sounded out the different words that they made.
To expand on our narrative discussion, I created a worksheet for which Josh and I could discuss descriptive language, metaphors, word associations/connotations, and images. In this worksheet, I had Josh compare the sound of words (mellifluous vs. raucous) and word associations (which words connote positive or negative images). We had a healthy discussion about these items. I will introduce Josh to poetry based on our discussion today.
Ashley began her session by playing a vowel combination board game. In the game, the players must successfully identify the sounds that the different vowel combinations make to advance. During the game, I helped Ashley come up with some tricks to help her remember the different vowel combinations. She worked very hard during this activity! After the game, we went to the computer lab and Ashley read a book on the Raz Kids computer program.
Grace began her session playing a phonics board game. The game has many different blends that the player must successfully identify to move forward. Grace did very well identifying the different blends and sounding out the ones that she didn't know. During the game, we created a word list using the different blends. After the game, we went to the computer lab and Grace read on the Raz Kids program. We moved her up a level and she was very excited about her progress!!
I gave Ben a couple of really difficult passages from the SAT. He did very well on one, but had difficulty with the other. But even then, he got more than 3/4 right.
Josh brought in a History homework paper today that he asked to read during our class session. To hone in on Josh's recalling abilities, I had him track the progression of each section with small notes for each paragraph. While Josh's handwriting is still quite large, he was able to jot down some really insightful ideas. We had to discuss the main point of each paragraph for sometime, as Josh would recount small details that did not contribute to the bigger, whole picture of each story.
