12.1 Reading

Reading, at last :)

Today, after an extended hiatus from the reading intervention program, we will once again begin.

Due to some confusion about how and what to do, plus student-led conferences, we have not been doing our reading intervention groups for over a month - since early October :(.

Our group will be focusing on comprehension. We will be using the Rewards Plus Social Studies program. We will be skipping some of the activities and focusing on vocabulary, reading, and writing summaries. Figuring it will take us 2 weeks to get through one lesson because we only meet for 30 minutes on Tues. and Wed. afternoons.

Day 1: For the vocabulary, I plan to begin by front loading the vocabulary, pronunciation and definition as presented in the text. Then I plan to have the students highlight the words as I read the text. This is all the time we will probably have for one 30-minute period.

Day 2: Review the vocabulary, do the rest of vocabulary exercises, have the students read the story.

Day 3-4: (Next week) After the long break, I expect I will need to review the vocabulary and pronunciations, then we will review the text/story, and begin talking about the summary...i.e., what is different between a retelling and a summary...help them pick out the main points. (This will be good practice for me as well since I tend to get caught up in retelling rather than summarizing.) Then they'll write their summary - think we'll have them do a pair-share.

Follow-up - Day 1:
Well, today went pretty well. The students were receptive to what we did ;) We went over the vocabulary first, talked about common words, made a list of the common words on the board, then had the students highlight vocabulary words in the story as I read it. After reading it, I asked the students to circle new words and words they were unsure of the meaning. We went around the room, I circled in my book the words as well. I had them use paragraph and line references which worked pretty well, then we discussed the words relating word parts to words they/we already knew, and talked about common things that we could relate to. We finished by having the students write the vocabulary words, not as a spelling test, but as a practice working with the words.