week 6

Assignment (due March 4, by noon, on blog)

Assuming Mary is in your class, what kind of in-class instructional intervention you will design to focus on the Mary’s strengths while addressing possible areas of need. Describe in details on the following:

• Instructional focus based on the assessment results
   
  Based on the assessment results it seems that one of the main focuses should be on building Mary’s comprehension skills. I think that an effective way that this could be done is to develop a set of focus questions for Mary to keep in mind while she is reading the text. Meaning to say when the passage is being introduced and her prior knowledge is coming out, the teacher should pin point a select amount of important facts that Mary can be mindful of while reading. It should be clear that these focus questions are not to distract her from her ability to read the text normally. Rather these questions are meant to guide her to understanding the main idea of the passage. Furthermore, I think that the look back method would also be helpful for Mary. Often times students get caught up in the technical aspect of reading and forget to look for the content. Therefore, it is an important skill for students to develop to be able to identify the main messages of the text and be able to locate them when answering a question.
   
• Length of Intervention (How many weeks? Daily lessons? How long is the lesson while maintaining the rest of your class?)
   
  The intervention that I mentioned is not necessarily a formal lesson that will take a certain amount of time. Rather what I suggested is a change in the style of the introduction of every lesson. Whenever Mary (and other students as well) read a passage apart of the introduction should be these focus questions. In reference to the look back method, I think that two lessons of teaching Mary how to identify and highlight the main points would be sufficient. This can be done through Mary reading a regular passage that she would be reading anyways in class. Instead of reading the passage in one large chunk, it would be broken up into paragraphs. After each paragraph Mary would be asked what the paragraph was meant to tell her. After Mary identifies these important points she would be asked to highlight the words that convey these points in different colors. This way when Mary is asked questions at the end of the passage she would be able to look back at her highlighted points quickly and answer the questions correctly.
   
• Intervention structure (intervention components, such as repeated reading, decoding, encoding, expository structure and details, writing…)
  The intervention structure would be to reread the text in smaller chunks then to identify what the smaller chunks are saying. I would have Mary read the whole passage then ask her comprehension questions. I would write down her answers so that we can compare her answers after reading the text just once to her answers after rereading the passage. Next we would read the passage one paragraph at a time. After each paragraph I would ask Mary to tell me the main idea of the paragraph and I would write it down. Next I would ask Mary to highlight the words in the paragraph that says the main idea. After this is done with each paragraph, I would reask her the comprehension questions from before. I would rewrite Mary’s answers and show her at the end how much more complete her answers were after rereading the text. If during the time that Mary is reanswering the questions she needs to look back, she could easily find the answers since she highlighted all of the main points.
   
• Create one sample mini-lesson that addresses Mary’s areas of need. ]
   
  Expository Text-“Where Do People Live?” (pg 237 in Qualitative Reading Inventory-5 textbook)
   
  People live in different places. Some people live in a city. Others live in the country. Still other people live in between the city and the country. They live in suburbs. Why do people live in these different places>
  People live in the city to be near their jobs. Cities have lots of factories, schools and offices. People work in these buildings. If people don’t want to drive a long way to their jobs, they live in the city. There are many other things to do in the city. Cities have museums and zoos. They also have many movie theaters.
  People live in the country to be close to their jobs, too. Many people who live in the country are farmers. They plant crops on their land. They may sell their crops or may use them to feed the animals they live on the farm. Farmers raise cows, pigs, and chickens. The main food that these animals eat is grain. There are other things to do in the country. You can find a river t fish in or take walks in the woods. The life in the country is quiet. People live in between the country and the city. They live in suburbs. Some people think that people who live in the suburbs have the best of both worlds. They live close to their jobs in the city. The suburbs are quieter than the city. They often have man movie theaters, too. It doesn’t take as long to go to either the city or the country. The suburbs are more crowded than the country but less crowded than the city. Where people live depends upon what they like most.
   To introduce the above expository text I would start off by asking where my student lived and the reasons she lives there. I would then ask her where she thinks a farmer lived and why. The focus questions for this passage would be: 1. Why do people live in certain places? 2. What are the different places where people live? 3. What are the differences between these places?
  After the introduction we would read through the whole passage and answer the above questions. After writing down these answers I would give the student a handful of highlighters and tell her that we are going to go through the passage again but this time we are going to highlight the main points after each paragraph. After reading each paragraph I will ask her to tell the main points and she will get to highlight the words. After the entire passage is finished we will reanswer the questions and compare the new answers to the old answers and celebrate their completeness.