What did students learn and which students struggled with the lesson?
Students practiced pre-reading strategies. They are learning how to make the text meaningful. We connected the text, Flat Stanley, to prior knowledge by visualizing what it would be like to be flat. What could you do flat? What couldn’t you do? Also students explained how they became flat…it was a riot. They came up with some hilarious flattening situations.
Students also learned about thick and thin questions. They applied these questions to the reading and then decided with their group which thick questions would help us understand the text best. Since currently this has been a group effort, it’s easy to see that at least some students really understand it…it will be hard to identify strugglers until getting back tomorrow to look at their personal thick questions (they are going to sticky thick questions in their IDR book today and tomorrow).
I did have behavioral strugglers. We talked about proper reader and listener behavior and several students were still off task, even after reminders. I haven’t got to the big content of my unit yet (brainstorming, letter writing…), once I do I’ll better be able to identify how students are doing. Basically, so far all we’ve done is read Flat Stanley (that and a pre-reading activity).

What are alternate reads (interpretations) of your students’ performance or products?
Indeed. During group reading sessions, I had a group where the following behaviors were observed: listeners not looking at the reader/book, listener playing with the plant, staring off into space. Now, conventionally I would see then and think that there’s no way that student is paying attention. But I wondered if perhaps that was how this student listened best…with something to occupy her hands. The same thing goes with doodles, I saw a handful of students doodling during group reading until expectations were reinforced. Only a select few students actually doodle to pay attention though, and my suspicion is that most of these students were just genuinely off task…expect for plant girl maybe. Again, I’ll better be able to read my students’ performances and products once there are more of them.

What did you learn about your students’ literacy practices that extend beyond your objectives?
Until this point I had only worked with my reading three reading groups. An ELL group, an at level group, and a group of higher readers. I did not know what groups below a P reading level looked like. Now I do, and although I suppose I should have surmised what that would look like, in reality I was caught off guard a bit. I learned about the incredible imaginations that my student’s weave into their learning everyday. I think sometimes we forget about this as teachers.



When and how will you re-teach the material to students who need additional support?
I kind of already had to make one revision for this. The group readings were taking way to long so I did a mini-mini-mini lesson on what being a good reader and a good listener looks like and then proceeded to read the book myself to the class, with groups following along in their book.
If I need to reteach the letter writing material to any students…it will depend on who the student is. If they are in my reading group then I will continue to work on that skill with them during group. If not, then it might become a morning work activity or maaaybe could become integrated to my teammate’s official “writing” time block.
Again, how to re-teach will depend on who and how many. I’m thinking a small group would be the most beneficial way to help students.

If you were to teach this same lesson again, what would you do differently and how do you think the changes would improve students’ learning?
For my initial pre-reading activity, I think everything went well. The only minor change that I would make is making the expectation clearer for what I wanted them to write down. There was a section where they were to sketch a drawing, and then three other sections where I was expecting text. Some students got stuck in a drawing mindframe and gave me pictures for all four sections. I could still evaluate their thinking, but it just wasn’t what I expected. I would make that clearer next time.
As far as the group reading went. I would have spent more time initially on what being a good reader and good listener looks like. I had them write their predictions in there notebooks which was good, but made it hard for me to assess if they were predicting or not. It would have been cool to have groups present these predictions to each other, but there simply just isn’t time for that. But by spending more initial time on what being a good reader/listener looks like I think that students learning would have been improved because we could have gotten done with that part it the unit more quickly providing more time for the post-reading/letter writing part of the unit…which I now feel like I have to try to squeeze in before Thanksgiving.