Anne - TS #8

Anne – TS #8

Date/Time:  Thursday, January 21, 2016, 6:30-7:30

Location:  Hecht House

Topic/Skills:  Reading:  Comprehension

Teacher Presentation:  We read an article about a freelance journalist.  For each paragraph, student identified words he did not know (journalist, freelance, editor, solitary, profession, etc.).  We looked them up in the dictionary, and he wrote them on a vocabulary list.  I checked for understanding of the text by asking questions about each paragraph, e.g., What does a journalist do?  What is a “dream job?”  Why does the journalist like doing what he does?  Why did he move to New York?  When student finished the article, he wanted to see a video, so we found one in which a child was interviewing two child actors.  We compared what she did with what the journalist in the article did.

Feedback provided to tutee:  I pointed out pronunciation errors and helped with vocabulary definitions.  Students read the text well with mostly correct intonation.  However, he lacked comprehension of what he read and tended to respond to questions based on the last sentence of the paragraph.  I pointed out the importance of scanning the whole paragraph if he needed to go back to the text to find the answer.  We practiced this with each paragraph.

Lessons learned:  The feedback I received about the last session was that the reading we did was too elementary for this student.  From links to several articles, I picked one that had a lot of quotes in it, as my intention had been to move from reading to use of quotation marks in dialogue.  We did not have time to do this, but we could do this in the next session. 

     The challenge for me was that the lesson was not mine until the last minute.  I had planned to read Charlotte’s Web building on our reading and conversation about spiders in the last session and to move from that text to the use of quotation marks, and from there to writing a dialogue between two of the animals.  Although the Internet sources state this book is grade level 4.6-5, I knew it was probably too easy for the student; he would likely know 95% of the words.  However, with the comprehension challenge of the reading we did use, I’m wondering how well he would comprehend what he read, even at a level below his ability to read the text fluently.