S16: Blog 2: My New Small Group

This past week I have begun pulling a new small group during our literacy block. The students I am pulling are currently reading below grade level. Right now, on-level would be considered a 20 or higher and these students range from 14’s to 18’s. With this group I am using decodable readers to help build their phonics skills. Decodable readers are these short stories, about 8 small pages long that have words that my students should be able to “decode” or sound out. Also, these stories are usually written in such a way that specific phonics skills are able to be focused upon, depending on which story you choose. We are able to print out new decodable readers every week from the district resources website. The planning tool given to us to use by the district every week provides information about how those weeks’ readers should be utilized and on what phonics skills they focus.

For example, on Wednesday this week I pulled my group of 3 students for the first time. I had two different decodable readers and allowed my students to choose which one they wanted to work with first. They selected the one entitled “The Unreal Party.” I had studied the planning tool and knew that the phonics focus of this story was prefixes. Students were supposed to read the story and identify words that began with prefixes like re-, un-, mis-, and pre-. Before we began reading the story I went over with my students what we were going to be doing, explaining how we would be reading the story and circling words that begin with prefixes. I also made sure they knew what a prefix was and wrote the list of prefixes we were looking out for on a small white board so my students would be able to reference them. Next to each prefix I wrote its meaning. For example, un- typically means “not.”

I asked my students to take turns reading pages of the decodable reader. I asked my students to do this because I also want to work to develop their fluency, which is being able to read accurately, efficiently, and with appropriate expression. This is another skill with which these students are struggling and need to improve upon. Cunningham and Allington (2015) discuss in Classrooms That Work how fluency is directly related to comprehension, which is being able to understand what you read and retell it or answer questions. Fluency and comprehension are the skills that are assessed to determine a student’s reading level (Cunningham & Allington, 2015).

After every page we stopped to discuss the words with prefixes that we had found on that particular page. We read the words together, to make sure proper pronunciation was occurring. I also asked the students to tell me what they thought the words meant. After, we came up with good definitions for the words. For example, we decided that the best definition for misread is to read wrong or incorrectly. We wrote these definitions down on the decodable readers for our own reference, so that when we read the story again we will already know the meanings of these sometimes tricky words. I plan on using this particular story and decodable reader again to help my students review what they have learned about prefixes. This story can also be used to examine another aspect of phonics, suffixes. This is something that I plan to spend time on in the coming week.

So why is phonics so important in helping my struggling readers improve? Phonics is an essential component of any reading education system. Cunningham and Allington (2015) discuss how phonics instruction is a huge building block to becoming both good readers and good writers. Phonics gives students the ability to decode words quickly so they know how to pronounce and spell them. Some phonics skills, like prefixes, also help students determine the meaning of words (Cunningham & Allington, 2015).

I truly enjoyed getting to work with my new small group this and look forward to doing even more with them in the future. They are good students who are committed to trying their best to improve their reading. I can’t wait to see the improvements they will make throughout the rest of the year! My goal is to have them on level and ready for the next grade by the end of the school year.

Addresses FEAPS 3 a and b

References:

Cunningham, P., & Allington, R. (2015). Classrooms That Work: They Can All Read and Write (6th ed.). New York, New York: Pearson.

#EDE4942 #FEAPS3A #FEAPS3B #classroomsthatwork #cunningham #allington #phonics