Marissa,

Thanks for sending this along for me to look through – let me know if you have any questions about the feedback.

UDL checkpoints focus:

1.1 Offer ways of customizing the display of information

3.3 Guide information processing, visualization, and manipulation

6.4 Enhance capacity for monitoring progress

9.1 Promote expectations and beliefs that optimize motivation

This lesson plan already incorporates some great variation in terms of presenting the words in multiple formats (Representation) and giving students multiple ways to show what they know (Action and Expression). I would challenge you to consider more ways to embed the content in context. It’s hard to do when you’re getting kids to begin reading because there’s not a lot of rich content out there in the 2-3 letter word arena. But spending more time with these words in the context of sentences in addition to all the great activities you’ve created will accomplish growth in both fluency and comprehension, which is never a bad thing.

Here are a few more Representation things to consider:

  • For the matching cards you might have two kinds of sets, one where sets of cards are two different colors (one set white, one blue, for example) so students know that once they’ve found a white “the” they are going to look for that word in blue next (a matched pair would be one white and one blue) then the next level of challenge would be to have them be the same color, then different fonts, caps and not caps, etc.
  • I get the sense this is mostly about fluency and not necessarily word meaning (and the meaning of these words is pretty hard to convey at the K level) but I am wondering what the text identification part of the lesson involves. What texts are they looking at? How will they know what words to look for? Will you hold up one of the word cards and then they hunt for that word in the texts? Consider texts where the nouns are pictures and these words are in between the images. Such as “I am a .” Or could they highlight or circle those words on a handout?
  • That being said – I think it’s always best to try and slip experiences where students learn meaning into literacy lessons so, in addition to matching single word cards, scholars could be given sentence strips and the sight words on cards. As they say/repeat after the teacher or read the sentences, they place the single sight word card on top of the matching word in the sentence – building the sentence as they go along. This will build meaning for the words, connect them to English sentence structure order, and “guide information processing” with auditory, visual and tactile (placing the word card on top of the matching word in the sentence strip) cues. It would be good to contrast sentences such as “I am A [pic of cat/dog/bunny/whatever/girl/boy]” with “I am THE [pic…]” so that the students begin to associate the difference between ‘a’ and ‘the’ in a meaningful context.
  • Students could use post–its with the sight words on them or word cards with sticky glue on one side (and pictures – even photos of the students could be used) to create short 3-4 sentence stories similar to the “Brown Bear Brown Bear” format. Again, this links the isolated sight words to a meaningful context. If the students are able to choose which pictures they use to create their sentence stories (e.g., dog/cat/truck/dinosaur/tree) then it also offers flexibility and multiple means of recruiting interest. The sight words could all be written in different bright colors as an additional scaffold [blue = a; green = the; orange = I]; then the color could be removed the next time to make the task more difficult and less scaffolded. One suggested sentence format could be:
  • a. I am [picture/name of student].
  • b. I see [picture of two eyes with word ‘see’] ‘a’ [pic of animal/vehicle.]
  • c. I see ‘a’ [pic] ‘and’ [pic].
  • d. I like/love [pic of heart with word] ‘the’ [pic of animal.]

As for monitoring progress:

  • Consider having students set some goals at the beginning of the lesson, “today we are going to learn 5 new words, let’s see how many of these words you know right now.” And then you could either have them do a variation on the exit ticket, or have them point to words in a text, or have them identify them on a list… but something where they can see which words they know and which they don’t. Then, when you get to the exit ticket you can have them score themselves at the end and see how they did compared to the beginning.
  • Along the way you can infuse questioning to ask students things like, “how can you tell which word this is?” “How are you finding the pairs?” And pointing out along the way what strategies you notice them using so they begin to become aware of the fact that readers use strategies to figure out how to identify words.

Which brings us to engagement:

  • This is closely related to the suggestions above, but makes me think of another tool you could use for students to gauge their own progress in learning the words. You could have a list of the words with 3 faces next to them and students mark which face describes how well they think they can read the word. This doesn’t work particularly well with tiny words like the 5 for this lesson but I just tested it with my Kindergartener and it might be an interesting “rubric” for students to use as you build up to more complex words. Then if they use the same “rubric” after the lesson they can see how they have changed their knowledge of each word.

am  

a  

the  

to  

and  

  • In addition to the students setting a goal, you could offer them a choice of how many words they want to learn – 3? 4? 5? With all being acceptable. Then the students could color in or check off the numbers at the end as part of the exit ticket (2 birds with 1 stone so to speak). If the students have personal binders or folders, each folder could have a monitoring sheet in it that the students choose from a selection (e.g., a rocket ship that’s divided into X number of stages from bottom to top; a road that’s divided into X number of sections; a tree that’s divided into X number of branches; a building/house that has X number of steps and then stories). The students get to color in the number of words they correctly identified at the end of the class. By keeping something like this in the kids’ work folders, they always know where they are and can easily monitor their own progress during each class. There are some fun websites that have free student progress charts. Here’s one
  • One of the things I’ve been reading about a lot lately is this fixed vs. growth mindset thing and the importance of helping students notice what it means to work hard vs. receive lots of empty praise for everything they do. So, again to reiterate what I suggest in the previous section I would use a lot of feedback along the way that points out HOW students are thinking and applying their thinking in working through each exercise in this lesson. When they succeed at a task saying something like, “I noticed that you took your time to think before each answer, that’s the kind of hard work readers do!” vs. “Good job reading those words!” communicates that they have the power to grow their ability to read. Similarly, pointing out WHY an answer is wrong or probing them with questions like, “What makes you say that?” or, “How can you tell?” teaches them to work through correcting mistakes vs. waiting for the teacher to always give them the right answer.

Kindergarten Reading
GRADE: / K / DATE: / 2.25.14
Tuesday / STEP LEVEL: / Pre/1
Lesson Pre-work / OBJECTIVE(S)
Scholars will work towards automatic recognition of pre-primer sight words – and, the, a, to, am
Lesson Intro / - Review Q2
- Review DREAMblocks
- Review Expectations
- Review Color Changes
Q2 / Letter-Sound ID – Already in Scholars’ IEP binders
Review / Review that most sight words are silly words – meaning when you sound them out the way we have learned, they don’t sound right, they sound silly. Sight words are words we have to see and know right away, just by looking at them. They are words we have to memorize.
Focus / Today we are going to be learning the sight words and, the, am, to, a
Practice /
  1. TW have flashcards. TW put the flashcard in front of the scholar. TW say the word, spell the word. Scholar will repeat. Scholar will do this 3 times for each word.
  2. Play-doh multi-sensory activity – see below
  3. FCRR Activity with A-Z books
  4. Matching Activity

Quick Check / Exit Slip

Part #1: Multi-sensory Activity

t h e

t o

a n d

a m

a

Part #2: FCRR Activity (Teacher will modify activity to fit the words that are used in this particular lesson, not the words the FCRR provides.

Link:

Part #3 Sight Word Memory – TW cut out the cards and have scholars play a memory/matching game with the cards.

Exit Slip

Name: ______Date: ______

Directions: Listen to your teacher. Circle the word she says for each question.

1)andtheaamto

2)andtheaamto

3)andtheaamto

4)andtheaamto

5)andtheaamto