Analysis of Previous Lesson

Teacher: Kelly Eaton / Student: J
Session 2 of 6 / Teaching Date: October 19, 2009 / Teaching time: 45 minutes
Outcome Objectives: J will have a firm grasp of the meaning of the story and the personality and motives of the characters. She will learn how to spell “guinea pig” and will understand the differences between “b”s and “p”s, and between “q”s and “g”s.
1. Familiar Reading
Rather than re-reading the first two chapters of Jenius the Amazing Guinea Pigby Dick King-Smith (a level L), we will review her writing sample and ask her why she answered the second question the way she did. I will ask her to go back to the part that made her answer that way, and then discuss the big ideas of the book (Judy loves guinea pigs, her classmates don’t, her teacher thinks they’re stupid and can’t be
trained, Judy’s two guinea pigs had a baby, which she named “Jenius.”) / Notes:
We looked back over her writing sample from last week. I asked her to show me the part about the queen. When asked how she would describe this book to a friend she said, “It’s about guinea pigs and a girl named Judy who has two guinea pigs.” So then I asked her which information was more important, the part about wanting to be queen or the guinea pigs? She said the guinea pigs were most important. We went back and discussed the major points of the first two chapters to refresh. I had her tell me what she remembered, then we went back through to fill in the gaps. I asked her to predict what might happen, she said: “Judy might train the new guinea pig and Jenius’s parents might die because they’re old.”
2. Read a section of a chapter book:
Chapter 3 of Jenius the Amazing Guinea Pig by Dick King-Smith (a level L). Have her read pages 17 – 19 silently (stop her just before the last sentence, after “something else.”) Then ask her to sum up what she just read. Prompt her with the following questions:
-  How is Judy feeling?
-  Why is Judy excited?
-  How do her parents react? Why?
Then move on to the next section. Have her read the rest of page 19 through the end of the chapter (page 21). Ask her to sum up what she just read. Prompt her with the following questions:
-  Why don’t Judy’s parents listen to her?
-  Why is Judy upset?
-  Is their something similar between the way Jenius’s parents reacted and the way Judy’s parents reacted?
I will ask her to predict what might happen next. / Notes:
Pages 17-19: When I asked her to tell me about the first couple pages she said, “Judy’s trying to tell her mom and dad something, but they won’t listen.” This was a good start, but didn’t cover everything, so I prompted her with the questions to the left. She said she thought Judy was feeling sad because her parents won’t listen. So I asked her how Judy’s training with Jenius was going. She said it wasn’t going well, so we went back and, after a little prompting, she found that in fact the training was going well. I asked why her parents won’t listen to Judy, she said, “because they don’t care and they think guinea pigs are dumb.”
Pages 19-21: Her first reaction, “Judy doesn’t tell her mom anything anymore because she doesn’t think she’ll listen.” With a little prompting she answered all the questions here correctly. I asked her to compare the way Jenius’s parents reacted with the way Judy’s parents reacted. At first she was confused, but after I explained more clearly what I meant, she answered correctly (neither set of parents listens).
3. Running Record
First 100 words of Chapter 4 of Jenius the
Amazing Guinea Pig. / Notes:
J made 8 errors and no self-corrections, giving her a 92% accuracy rate, and a self-correction rate of 1:8. The accuracy rate shows the text is good for her, but her self-correction rate still isn’t good. It’s clear that her comprehension is a big factor in this – she doesn’t go back and check because she often is unaware of the meaning of what she’s reading. There was one sentence in particular that really concerned me. The sentence was “Judy was the ideal trainer, patient and hard-working, and her new pet was the perfect pupil.” We revisited this in our word work/strategy. I think the more we work on comprehension, the better her self-correction rate will become so we will continue to focus on that in the next lesson.
4. Work work/strategy
Review her running record. In the last session she made a few errors because she did not read through the whole word. If she made these same mistakes, I will go back to one or two of the words she missed, and ask her to drag her finger underneath it as she says it. If this isn’t effective, I will model it for her. Then we’ll do another one. She also had a problem using meaning and syntax to fix her mistakes. If she does this again, go back to those errors and read aloud what she read before. Ask her if it makes sense, and where she might change a word. (If she hasn’t made these mistakes again, address whatever problems seem to be present. I’m assuming her problems will be similar to last week, however.)
Word Sort: For word sort we will use a “short a long a” sort from the Words Their Way book (p. 189). Model how to sort the words by saying a one short and one long word out loud and putting them in different columns. (The short -a words will be: gas, has, back, happy, map. The long -a CVCe words will be: cape, came, name, lake. The long -a CVVC words will be: chain, rain, pail, pain. The oddballs will be: have, was.) Then ask her to try to do it by herself. If she struggles, I will help her by prompting her to sound them out and asking her which ones sound the same. Tell her not all of them will fit into a category. I am doing this sort because she had a problem with long vowels on her spelling inventory. / Notes:
I started this section by going back to the sentence I mentioned in the last section – “Judy was the ideal trainer, patient and hard-working, and her new pet was the perfect pupil.” J had read it: “Judy was the idea… dinner, plant and hard-working, and her new pet was the perfect… purple.” (during the running record, she actually asked me for help with “ideal” so she got it before we did this part) I asked her to read this sentence out loud again, and she read it exactly the way she had in the running record, so I asked her whether or not she thought the sentence made sense. She said it didn’t so I asked her what she thought she should do when a sentence doesn’t make sense. She hesitantly answered that you should sound out the words, so I said “should we go back and try the sentence again?” And so we did. And then when it stopped making sense, I stopped her, and explained that when it stops making sense, go back to the beginning, and then sound out the first word that doesn’t make sense. So we started with “trainer,” which she’d read as “dinner.” I asked her to sound it out and she got “tranner,” so I told her the word was trainer and asked her if she knew what that was, she did so we went back to the beginning of the sentence again, moved through “trainer” and got to “patient.” We had discussed the word “special” after the read-aloud because it was misspelled in Judy’s journal, so I related patient to special, explaining that those words don’t look quite how you’d expect them so you have to just remember how they’re spelled. We went on like this until she read the whole sentence correctly. She was so excited!! I asked her what it meant, and she answered correctly. So then we just talked a little bit about the strategies she had just used to figure out the sentence. I was very pleased with how this part of the lesson went!
I did the long -a, short -a word sort, and she did very well on it. I only had her sort short from long, and then sort the “long -a”s into the CVVC pattern and the CVCe pattern. She did a really good job sounding out the words and putting them together. Next week I will probably do another long/short vowel short, maybe “e”s.
5. Written response to book:
Depending on what she has brought up in our discussion of the book, I will ask her to write two more sentences, but on one basic topic or incident. I will help her with these to an extent, to keep her comfortable. I will prompt her with comments such as “remember what we talked about?” and so on. I will ask for the first sentence to be a summary-type sentence (i.e. “this happened.”) and the next sentence will be a little deeper (i.e. why did that happen?). I want to get a feel for her understanding of the next couple chapters before I decide exactly what questions these will be. / I actually asked her to answer three questions.
1. How did Judy’s parents react when she told them about Jenius?
2. Why did they react that way?
3. What is this book about/how would you describe it to a friend who’d never read it?
Her answers to the first two were satisfactory, although some spelling was worrisome (for instance, she spelled didn’t “dient), but I was happy with her response as far as comprehension goes. In the third question, she again mentioned Judy wanting to be a queen, even though we spent so much time talking about how that wasn’t important! I was really frustrated about that because I couldn’t figure out what to do to help her. She did include a couple things about the guinea pigs, though, so there was a little improvement at least.
After the comprehension questions we still had a little time so I worked with her a little bit on letter identification, letter formation, and spelling. I asked her if she could remember how to spell patient (she spelled it paitent, so she was close), and then I showed her how to spell guinea pig, we talked about the differences between “q”s and “g”s and “b”s and “p”s. I also showed her an easier way to form “d”s (she was drawing a circle and then a stick so sometimes it was difficult to read). For the most part, I think this section was successful. I got to touch on a lot of things I wanted to and she responded really well.

· For the most part, I was very pleased with how this lesson went. J responded well to my prompting, did better with the second section of silent reading, and was very successful in the word work/strategy portion. I was a little frustrated by her answer to my third comprehension question at the end. I was hoping we’d figured out the main meaning of the story by now. There was definitely some improvement, but we’ll just have to keep working on it. I’m also frustrated because I’m not sure what to do about her spelling. It varies a lot and seems somewhat unpredictable. She did fix the word “about” from last week, when she spelled it “abot,” and she learned how to spell guinea pig, which is great! There are definitely still a lot of things I need to work with her on, though.

Lesson Plan for Next Session

Teacher: Kelly Eaton / Student: J
Session 3 of 6 / Teaching Date: October 26, 2009 / Teaching time: 45 minutes
Outcome Objectives: J will have a solid grasp of comprehension techniques (namely, going back and sounding out words), and will have a firm understanding of the main themes and issues of the story. She will also know how to search for and find motive and other characterization in details.
1. Familiar Reading
To begin or lesson, we will go back to what she wrote in the previous session. I will ask her to tell me about the book, who the main characters are, what has happened in the first three chapters, and what she thinks will happen next. I will again emphasize that the part about Judy wanting to be a queen is not the most important part of the book by showing her how much more the book is about guinea pigs and Jenius (by showing her how they only talk about being queen for about a page and a half.) / Notes:
2. Read a section of a chapter book:
J only read the first 100 words of chapter of chapter four last week, so have her read the first few pages of chapter four (pages 22 through halfway down page 24, have her stop after “swelled head.”) silently. Then ask her to tell you about them. If she doesn’t give a thorough answer, prompt her with these questions:
-  What are Judy and Jenius doing?
-  What time of year is it?
-  How is Jenius feeling?
Now have her read the rest of page 24 through page 28 (the end of the chapter). This is a little longer than she’s read in the last couple sessions, so I want to see how she does with it. Ask her to tell you about what she just read. If her answer isn’t thorough, prompt her with the following questions:
-  How is Joe (Jenius’s dad) feeling?
-  Why is he feeling that way?
-  What does Jenius do?
-  Was it a good thing to do? Why or why not?
-  What is Jenius’s attitude like?
-  How does Judy feel about what Jenius did?
Then I will ask her to predict what she thinks might happen next. How / Notes:
3. Running Record
First 100 words of Chapter 5 of Jenius the
Amazing Guinea Pig. (p. 29-30) / Notes:
4. Work work/strategy
Review her running record. In the last two sessions she made a few errors because she did not read through the whole word. I will go back to one or two of the words she missed, and ask her to drag her finger underneath it as she says it. If this isn’t effective, I will model it for her. Then we’ll do another one. She also had a problem using meaning and syntax to fix her mistakes. If she does this again, go back to those errors and read aloud what she read before. Ask her if it makes sense, and where she might change a word. If she makes errors besides these, address those as well, but as of now reading through the whole word and using meaning/syntax to fix mistakes are the priorities.
Word Sorting: Do a word-sorting activity with short “e”s and long “e”s. (short “e”s: tell, bed, net, shred, cell, mess, speck, mend, cent; long “e”s: me, we, these, deep, cease, meal, freeze, crease, sneak). / Notes:
5. Written response to book:
Depending on what J and I have discussed, I will ask her to write 2-3 consecutive sentences on one question (rather than the 1 sentence answers), probably delving into motive or feeling. If she struggles with this, I will prompt her with questions, such as “what did we talk about?” and basic “who, what, where, why?” questions.