Lesson Plan Outline JMU Elementary Education Program Emily Smith-George Mrs.

Fitzgerald/ Stump Elementary 14 October 2013 A. TITLE/TYPE OF LESSON: Plant Life/ Introduction B. CONTEXT OF LESSON: Students have now been exposed to the various literature genres. They are able to choose the genre of a text based on the content of the work. We will now be exploring the genre of nonfiction further by studying specific text features that can be used to assist students comprehension. This knowledge of nonfiction text features can then be transferred to other situations. For example, students can analyze text features when reading menus, newspapers, brochures, magazines, instruction manuals, recipes, and maps in order to develop a more complete understanding of the material. Students have practiced reading short nonfiction passages about specific science processes, such as pollination, but now they will be moving into the more complex reading presented in their science textbook. In addition, the students are about to conclude their unit of study, regarding plants, with a unit test this Wednesday. This means that the students should be fairly familiar with a lot of the terms and information presented in this reading. C. LEARNING OBJECTIVES Understand (Concepts/Skills) Know/Do (learning objectives) The students will understand The students will be able to use text features to predict that analyzing specific learning, ask questions, make connections, and/or nonfiction text features will summarize the passage. aid in the comprehension of the overall passage.

D. ASSESSING LEARNING Know/Do (Learning Assessment plan objectives) The students will be able to Once we have talked about specific text features students use text features to predict will preview the work in order to predict their learning, learning, ask questions, make and I will record their answers. Students will also connections, and/or summarize each paragraph as we work through the text, summarize the passage. and I will observe these summaries. Finally, students will answer questions based on the text, which will be collected and will demonstrate their overall comprehension of the text.

E. RELATED VIRGINIA STANDARDS OF LEARNING

4.4 The student will investigate and understand basic plant anatomy and life processes. Key concepts include . a) the structures of typical plants and the function of each structure; . b) processes and structures involved with plant reproduction; . c) photosynthesis; and . d) adaptations allow plants to satisfy life needs and respond to the environment. 4.6 The student will read and demonstrate comprehension of nonfiction texts. . a) Use text structures, such as type, headings, and graphics, to predict and categorize information in both print and digital texts. F. MATERIALS NEEDED 1. Science textbooks 2. Questions regarding science textbook 3. Pencils/ dry erase markers G. PROCEDURE Preparation: Choose an appropriate passage and related questions. Engage: 1. I know you have all talked a lot about literature genres who can name one of the genres for me? Now who can explain what genre a textbook reading would fall into? Are all textbooks readings nonfiction? Why or why not? (They are all nonfiction because nonfiction means that the writing is based on facts, real events, and real people.) So this means our science book is________ (pause for answer from whole class). 2. Now before you start to read a nonfiction text what are some things you might look for when you preview it or walk through it? What might you look at just to give you an idea of what is inside? Write these text features on the board: table of contents, titles, headings, sub-headings, glossary, index, photographs, graphs, diagrams, captions, maps, and font style (bold, italics, highlighted). As students present each feature I will have them explain to the class what the feature is and why it is important. When students have named all that they can I will remind them of any they forgot. You can use these text features when you read nonfiction to help you preview the text and to help keep you on track while you are reading. How might these different features help? (Give you an idea of the

topic or main idea of a section, tell you important words to understand, help you define words or find them in other sections, etc.). Implementation: 1. Now we are going to use our knowledge about all of these text features to read a passage in our science textbook together. 2. Lets preview it together. Turn to page A80 and look at those two pages as well as A82 and A83. What do you see that gives us an idea of what we are reading about? (Example: The title of the chapter tells me I'm going to read about plant growth and reproduction. If you look at the heading on A 82 you can see that first we will read about how a seed grows. The main idea is also at the top of the page so I can keep that in mind while I read. Certain words are boldfaced these are important, so I'll try to remember them. There are photographs and diagrams I can use these to get a clear picture in my mind of what I'm reading.) 3. Now we are also going to preview by looking at the questions we want to answer while reading the text. Everyone read the questions silently. 4. Now that we have an idea about what we are going to read and the questions we need to answer we will get started. Keep the questions in mind and when you think you have found the answer to a question raise your hand and we will talk about it. Who wants to read the first paragraph for us right under the heading How Does a Seed Grow? 5. We will now popcorn read around the room stopping to answer the questions. If we get through a section and no one raises their hand that they have found the answer I will have students go back and revisit that paragraph. Closure: What have you learned about how a seed grows? Did the text features help you learn about this? H. DIFFERENTIATION This lesson is meant as the students first time reading through the science textbook. Therefore it is scaffold in that we are doing it as a class and I am there to help them look back at answers. Students can rely on me as well as their teammates to answer these questions. Also, there is both a visual and auditory aspect to this lesson, the textbook as well as the discussion we had previously. Students are given the option to read, but at this point they do not have to read in front of the class unless they are comfortable. I. WHAT COULD GO WRONG AND WHAT WILL YOU DO ABOUT IT? 1. I may run out of time depending on how long the discussion on text features takes, in which case we will read as much of the passage as possible. 2. The students may not be able to accurately answer the questions, but they will be able too look back and use their team members to assist them. I will also try to

facilitate success by helping them locate the specific section the answer can be found in by using text features. 3. The students may have trouble pronouncing, and understanding, some of the harder scientific words in the passage. I will help by reminding students that it is ok to pronounce some words wrong, some are even hard for me! Also, I will encourage other students to help struggling readers with harder words by providing support, and I will do the same.

Reflection I taught this lesson three times throughout the day to all of the fourth graders. Each time was a little different because of the students and how they interact with each other as well as myself. Overall I think this lesson went fairly well. The discussion at the beginning went smoothly and the students brought up a lot of relevant text features on their own with little guidance from me, while others such as diagram I had to coax out of them by reminding them of what we might find in our science journals. This discussion was aligned with the language SOL I chose and has provided a good frame of reference for the students. What I mean by this is on a later day in practicum a student was having trouble finding the answer to a reading daily review question and we had a quick discussion about these text features. I asked her to remind me what some of the features we look at are. After we named a few she mentioned picture, and I asked what it was called when there was a description under a picture. She remembered the word captions and instantly realized that the answer to the question was located in the caption at the bottom of the page. She had forgotten to look. She did not remember to look at all the features herself, which tells me that they need a lot of practice with these features, but she was able to find the answer after I reminded her of the importance of these features. I have had similar interactions with a few other students from my homeroom also occurring during reading time. This showed me that my language SOL was important in both science and reading, and that the integration of the two will help students see the importance of comprehension in all subject areas. This was the students first time with the textbook, which is why I chose to do it as a whole class rather than small groups. However, by doing as a whole group there was no

room for differentiation in the reading level. Every student was given the same textbook and asked to read the same pages. If I were to do this lesson again in science I would use various texts, magazines and trade books along with the textbook, on the same subject in order to differentiate for different readers. My teacher currently does not implement this technique in science class, but in my own classroom I would like to find a way for each student to successfully access the material. Overall, based on the feedback from my teacher and supervisor as well as the students work, I think this lesson went well. I am now even more aware of the importance of explicitly teaching non-fiction text features early and often.