Small Reading Lesson Plans

For my small reading lesson plans I decided that I wanted to work with students that were struggling in order to help them develop their reading skills that were lacking.  When I asked my teacher who she thought would be best for me to do this with, she directed me to two students who I thought would be perfect for these lesson plans.  While observing these two individual students over the past several months, I have seen that these students are able to comment on their favorite characters in stories, but they are not able to understand what the main point of the story is or the main events that occur in the story.  Basically these two students are lacking in their overall reading comprehension.  Since they are only in kindergarten, they are not able to read long stories to themselves, so they are expected to listen to stories that are read to them daily.  It is important for the students to listen so that they are able to comprehend what is happening in the story since they are unable to read the story to themselves.

Since I want to focus on the students' comprehension, I will read a story to the two students called Love is a Family by Roma Downey.  Before I begin reading, I will explain to the students that I want them to be thinking about who their favorite is while I read the story and that I will want them to explain to me why the character selected is their favorite.  After I am done reading them the story I will have them draw me their favorite character and tell me why.  I am expecting that by doing this the students will be focussing heavily on the characters in the story and not necessarily the events in the story or what is actually happening.

The next week I will take these same students and read them the same story.  This time before I begin reading I will tell the students that I want them to be thinking about everything that is happening in the story.  By prompting them in this way, my goal is to have them really focus on the storyline and the major events in the story.  After I have finished reading the story I will have the kindergarteners draw me three events from the story: something that happened at the beginning, middle, and end and then explain to me what they are and why they think they are important.  My goal with this task is for students to be able to think about books as the whole picture and try and grasp meaning from the story.