Minilessons

Link to both minilessons:

https://docs.google.com/a/msu.edu/document/d/1846NnmDS4g4M5CiT7JCmSYwXJONSV143C6fYhBLxeDk/edit

The student I chose to do the high-frequency lesson with did much better than I had originally anticipated. Out of the list of 84 sight words that my MT gave me to work with, she quickly and correctly identified 82 of them. The students do a lot of work with their sight/word wall words throughout the year and it seems like this is really paying off. By using them in the their journals and playing games that require the kids to physically point out words on the wall, the first graders have become very familiar with how to identify them. The only two words she stumbled on were "hear" (which she pronounced as "hair") and "went" (identified as "wait"). She was also able to write sentences that used the preselected sight words accurately and appropriately.

For the fluency minilesson dealing with chunking, I worked with a different student who has had some problems with fluency in the past. He doesn't have any issues with identifying or sounding out words, but his reading is often choppy and doesn't flow as well as my MT would like it to. We used a book titled "Hospital Party" to do the lesson- one that was introduced to him and put in his book box about a week earlier. He had only read it in a guided setting one time and it was considered to be at his independent level. I read through the book before I pulled him out in the hallway and chose the pages we would be focusing on. After making copies of the selected pages, I marked the papers with the spots that I thought sentences could successfully be "chunked" into. He seemed a little confused when I first introduced the concept of chunking, but after going through the first few sentences, he caught on quickly. Overall I would consider the minilesson to be successful- when I handed him a physical copy of the book and asked him to read me the same sentences one more time, he read a noticeably quicker pace and did a better job of having the entire sentence flow together.