Today’s session was designed by one of my co-teachers and focused on animals, set up specifically with stations. To start off the day, we had our student re-cap the past few chapters in his instructional-level chapter book, The Million Dollar Shot. This was to get him on track with this week and give him a preview for future reading.
The second station was reading aloud. The student was given the option of a book to read aloud among 15 previously selected by the teachers. Each book was about animals and were informative as well as interesting, with both pictures and facts. He selected “Honey, Honey… Lion!” Since we wanted to push our student to read quickly and efficiently, we had him read aloud while one of the teachers used her finger to guide him through the pages. By having one teacher use her finger to go along each word, it pushed our student to keep reading at a faster pace. It also seemed to help a lot with his fluency, which was encouraging!
The next station was fun—the stations alternated between hard work and fun. We gave him two ‘Spot the Difference’ worksheets (similar to Hidden Pictures or Seek and Find where the person has to find the differences between a top picture and a bottom picture). Our student seemed to have fun with this, and though it’s not directly related to reading, it helps our student to be able to identify differences, which relates to identifying punctuation and other details in reading.
Following the Spot the Difference, we gave our student two fluency passages to read aloud. These were timed and miscues were recorded. What was encouraging, is that on the second time through, our student read much faster and had less miscues. On the first passage, he went from 1:12 to 0:51 seconds. On the second passage, he went from 2:46 to 2:30 and also learned, from context clues, what an aviary was. Not only was he reading for quickness and fluency, but also for comprehension. He did well with pronunciation and answered post-questions with minimal errors—this was definitely exciting!
We took a short break and did a group dance to the ‘Sid Shuffle’ (the character from Ice Age—another animal-related activity!) And then for fun, we all danced to What Did the Fox Say. This helped everyone to relax and let off some steam.
To end the session, the teachers read two chapters in The Million Dollar Shot, leaving our student with a cliff-hanger to start our next session! Overall, I think that the quick-reading fluency passages were the most effective part of today and us teachers are planning on using them again for our final week together.