Elementary Reading/Language Arts C & I

Lesson Plan Format

Standards: What state and national standards are addressed?

K.11 The student will write to communicate ideas. a)Draw pictures and/or use letters and phonetically spelled words to write about experiences, stories, people, objects, or events. b)Write left to right and top to bottom.

Intended Audience: This lesson is designed for a Kindergarten class with 21 students. The majority of students are Emergent Readers and are in Letter-Name stage of spelling. The class has two English Language Learners who sometimes need additional support in both comprehension and communication. There is one student who is an advanced reader and writer. This student reads independently at the second grade level and writes two and three page stories with mostly accurate spelling. Behavioral Objectives: What new behavior should students be able to display as a result of having participated in this lesson? (Conditions, behavior, criteria) 1. After hearing Hello, Ocean by Pamela Ryan read aloud, students will identify how the author uses each of her senses to describe the ocean. 2. Using a phrase bank as a reference, students will write two sentences describing their favorite place through at least two senses. Materials, Time, Space: What things will you need? How much space? Class/group size. How much time for each part? Read aloud: Time: 8 minutes; Materials: Hello, Ocean by Pamela Ryan; Space: students seated on carpet Graphic organizer and model: Time: 10 minutes; Materials: attached 5 Senses graphic organizer, document camera, Hello, Ocean by Pamela Ryan; Space: students seated on carpet Writing activity: Time: 15 minutes; Materials: phrase bank (projected on document camera and a chart paper copy), lined writing paper for each student, crayons, Space: students seated at desks Sharing: Time: 7 minutes; Materials: student writing; Space: students seated on carpet The Lesson Proper Introduction: How will the topic be introduced? How will the students attention be elicited? Introduce the book, Hello, Ocean, by telling the students this book is about one of the authors favorite places. The author describes this place using all of her senses so that the readers feel

like they are there. Prompt students to recall the five senses. Before reading, direct students to pay attention to how the author describes her favorite place through each of her senses. Content Focus: What will be done to present and have the students explore the content of the lesson? Include key questions. Read the story aloud. Emphasize key vocabulary related to the five senses. Ask the students what place the author was trying to describe. Place the attached graphic organizer under the document camera. Use a blank sheet of paper to cover everything but the ocean at the top. Remind the students that in the book, the author used all of her senses to describe the ocean. Ask students how the author used her eyes to described what the ocean looked like. What did she see? Move the blank sheet of paper to reveal the I see row. Continue this process for each of the remaining senses. Inform the students that they will be practicing using their senses to describe their favorite place just like Pamela Ryan. Explain that they will pick two of their senses, and describe their favorite place in two sentences, using the attached phrase bank, which will be projected on the document camera and posted on chart paper on the far side of the room. Model the writing task they will do on the document camera. Think aloud while drawing a picture of a favorite place, selecting two senses, locating the corresponding phrases in the phrase bank, and writing two simple sentences using these sentence stems. Emphasize using a capital letter at the beginning of the sentence, spaces between words, and a period at the end of each sentence. Direct the students think of the place they would like to describe and share their idea with a neighbor. Then direct students to go to their seats and begin the writing task. Circulate while the students are writing to offer them guidance and provide help as needed. Closure: How will the lesson be brought to a close? After allowing the students fifteen minutes to write, have the students bring their writing to the carpet for sharing time. Explain that two students names will be drawn from the star jar to share their writing with the whole class. These students can sit in the rocking chair and read their work using the microphone. Before drawing names, tell the students that the class can help each other become better writers by offering praise and asking questions for each others work. Model making one compliment and asking one question about the first star writers work. Then guide student volunteers in making one compliment and asking one question about the next star writers work. After two students share, direct the students to share their work with their neighbor. Instruct them to practice making one compliment and asking one question about their neighbors work. Evaluation: How will the students learning be evaluated? Formative: What assessments will the teacher make as the lesson unfolds?

Are students displaying signs of active listening during the read-aloud? Do student responses during the discussion of the text reflect understanding of how the author used her senses to describe a place? To what extent do students display modeled writing behaviors (using the phrase bank, sounding out words, spacing between words, using capitals and periods appropriately)? Summative: What products (written work, performances, or tests) will be submitted by students or groups of students to demonstrate their learning? Final student work should consist of a picture of a place and two sentences, each of which describes the place through one of their senses.

Background Information: Discuss briefly what is being taught in the lesson: the key concepts, definitions, facts, vocabulary, skills, and/or values. Concepts: Authors use each of their five senses to help them describe their experiences to readers. When authors describe an experience using each of their five senses, it helps the reader feel like the experience was their own. Facts: People have five senses: sight, smell, hearing, touch, taste Skills: Communicating sensory experiences, writing sentences

The Ocean
Looks like Gray I see Green Blue

I hear Sounds like

I feel Feels like

I smell Smells like I taste Tastes like

I see

I hear

I feel

I smell

I taste

Reflection After delivery of the lesson, reflect on your perception of the effectiveness of the lesson. For the guided reading lesson, watch your video and provide feedback based on your observation of your performance. For the read/think/write aloud lesson, reflect on your interactions with students during the read aloud/think aloud of the picturebook and during the write aloud (use the resulting chart to reflect on students thinking) and student feedback and student writing samples. Were students engaged? Did you meet your objective how do you know (use your evaluation information)? What, if anything, would you change if you were to do the lesson again? Plus any other insights into the delivery of the lesson.

Overall, I feel the lesson was developmentally appropriate and successful at introducing students to using sensory descriptions in writing I feel the mentor text was well suited to supporting the targeted writing strategy. Students exhibited signs of active listening throughout the read aloud, and were able to recall the authors descriptions as we filled in the graphic organizer. I think the use of the graphic organizer to synthesize what they read provided a good way to reinforce sensory vocabulary used in the text, such as see, look, sight, hear, listen, sound, smell, scent, and taste. I think the students really benefitted both from having the phrase bank available, as this not only provided a visual reinforcement of selected vocabulary, but also provided students a valuable resource during the actual writing process. I think that I did well ensuring that writing task was developmentally appropriate for the students. The phrase bank and modeling provided the structure to support those who needed it, but the assignment allowed for students at every level to exercise creativity and access the task at their individual levels. Overall, I was pleased with the students writing. I expected the students to use the phrase bank to copy two of the phrases as sentence stems and complete these sentence stems using initial and final sounds to write words to the best of their ability. Fourteen of the nineteen

students present that day met that expectation. Two of these fourteen exceeded expectations by writing more than two sentences and utilizing more than two senses to describe their favorite place. These two students also consistently utilized punctuation and spaces between words. Five students did not meet my expectations because they did not utilize two sentence stems from the phrase bank or did not use initial or final sounds. Three of these five students are in the lowest reading group, and two are English Learners. Two or these students simply wrote a string of letters. The rest of the students in this group showed evidence of using the phrase bank, but did not write the full phrases or only used one phrase rather than the directed two. One of these students, for example, utilized the phrase, I see, as well as the word, look, and a lot of color vocabulary; but he did not follow directions by utilizing two senses, and when he read his work aloud, he did not articulate complete sentences, but rather a string of vocabulary. I think this shows that students need reinforcement on the strategies of using phrase and word banks. Though my cooperating teacher has a word wall, the only words that have been on it this year are the students names. As such, the students have not had an extensive amount of practice copying text from a resource and utilizing this in their writing. Though I tried to model this process, it is clear that several of the students did not understand or practice this strategy. I hope that by continuing to reinforce this strategy, students will learn to use these valuable resources to improve their writing. The students really seemed to benefit from the opportunity to share their writing. The opportunity to read their work to the class is a rare one, so the students that were selected as models were very proud to read. The other students seemed to benefit from having student models of good completion of the task, as the model was within their proximal zone of

development. I think the discussion that we had about these models enabled the students to lean from their peers, thereby contributing to the development of our classroom community.