Student Learning Plan

Mary Vause

CRIN E22/E10

February 21, 2009

Grade: kindergarten

Subject area: reading (phonemic awareness/phonetics)

SOL Standards:

SOL K.4The student will hear, say, and manipulate phonemes (small units of sound) of spoken language.

a)Divide one-syllable words into sounds (phonemes).

SOL K.7The student will develop an understanding of basic phoneticprinciples.

a)Match consonant and short vowel sounds to appropriate letters.

b)Identify beginning consonant sounds in single-syllable words.

Measurable objective:

Given a hands-on small group lesson on identifying phonemes in sound boxes, the students will orally identify the correct letter sound for the beginning, middle, or end of a three-letter word 80% of the time.

Intervention objective:

After participating in a hands-on small group lesson identifying phonemes in sound boxes, the targeted student will orally identify the correct letter sound for at least 17 capital letters and at least 14 lower-case letters.

Why: As seen in the two kindergarten SOLs above, mastery of phonemic awareness (particularly letter-sound correspondence) is an integral part of the kindergarten curriculum. Phonemic awareness/letter-sound correspondence are also areas where the targeted student needs substantial help. Therefore, a lesson on phonemic awareness/letter-sound correspondence that includes differentiation for each student in the group will be beneficial to the targeted student as well as to his peers.

I selected Words Their Way for the phonemic awareness lesson/intervention because it meets the characteristics of quality phonemic awareness programs that I learned about during my intervention research: (a) it moves from simple tomore complex tasks; (b) it explicitly and systematically teaches the manipulation of phonemes; and (c) it teaches one or two types of phoneme manipulation at a time instead of multiple types. Also, it uses small-group instruction rather than whole-group or one-on-one instruction (Santi, Menchetti, & Edwards, 2004).

Materials: “sound boxes” activity for identifying beginning, middle, and end phonemes in three-letter words fromWords Their Way: Word Study for Phonics, Vocabulary, and Spelling Instruction (p. 115)

Step-by-step lesson plan:

  1. Context of the lesson  This lesson fits into the phonemic awareness portion of the kindergarten reading curriculum. All students will complete the Words Their Way primary spelling inventory prior to the lesson. (The gifted student (a kindergartener who reads at a second-grade level) will take the Words Their Way elementary spelling inventory, which can assess higher orthographic spelling levels.) The lesson will be differentiated and taught in small groups, as recommended by the intervention research. I will analyze the results of this pre-assessment and group students by orthographic ability level, with three to four students in each group. The lesson will take place during literacy centers. Each small group will be called over to the round table for a Words Their Way activity targeted to their pre-assessment results, while the rest of the students rotate through the literacy centers.

One of the small groups will consist of the targeted student “Nathan” as well as two of his classmates, “Mark” and “Danny.” The results of the Words Their Way primary spelling inventory revealed that “Nathan,” the targeted student, scored between the late emergent and early letter-name alphabetic stages. He needs to work on recognizing the “w” sound at the beginning of a word and recognizing “g,” “b,” “p,” “t,” and “m” sounds at the end of a word. “Mark” is in the late emergent stage and needs to focus on recognizing “h” and “w” sounds at the beginning of a word. “Danny” is between the early and middle letter-name alphabetic stages and needs to work on recognizing “u” and “e” sounds in the middle of three-letter words. Based on these students results, a way to differentiate instruction for all three students simultaneously is to design a task similar to the “Sound Boxes: Finding beginning, middle, and end phonemes” activity on page 115 in Words Their Way (please see full citation below). During the activity, the students will receive a picture card that represents a three-letter word. We will say the word together as a group. “Mark” will be responsible for sounding out the first letter of the sound box, “Nathan” will be responsible for the last letter of the sound box, and “Danny” will be responsible for the middle letter of the sound box. If students have difficulty identifying the phonemes on their own, I will sound the word out slowly several times for them in order to help scaffold the activity. Depending on how “Mark” and “Nathan” perform, I may challenge them with some end-sound and middle-sound boxes. Depending on how “Danny” performs, I may challenge him to identify phonemes for longer words, or challenge him to decode a few words that I put up, rather than encoding words from pictures. Sample words that I will give that include the various initial, middle, or end letter sounds that the three students have trouble with include “web,” “wag,” “hum,” “hot,” “hop,” etc. I also may incorporate some words from the primary spelling inventory that they struggled with, such as “gum,” “dig,” “pet,” etc.

  1. Objectives 

Given a hands-on small group lesson identifying phonemes in sound boxes, the students will orally identify the correct letter sound for the beginning, middle, or end of a three-letter word 80% of the time.

After participating in a hands-on small group lesson identifying phonemes in sound boxes, the targeted student will orally identify the correct letter sound for at least 17 capital letters and at least 15 lower-case letters.

  1. Assessment procedures  The Words Their Way primary spelling inventory will be used as a pre-assessment in order to group students and select appropriate Words Their Way activities for each group. (The gifted student will take the Words Their Way elementary spelling inventory instead.) These assessments do not take long to administer because students may stop after getting five words wrong in a row. After the lesson, students will retake the spelling inventory as a summative assessment activity.

For the targeted student only, I administered a letter-sound correspondence pre-test in addition to the Words Their Way primary spelling inventory. The student was unable to provide the sound for the following capital letters: F, K, P, O, U, Y, X, I, E, and G. He was unable to provide the sound for the following lower-case letters: f, k, h, u, y, l, q, m, s, x, i, and e. I will be administering the same letter-sound correspondence test with him again after the lesson, and our goal will be to improve on his previous performance.

  1. Content and instructional strategies  The orthographic spelling stages include emergent spelling, letter-name-alphabetic spelling, within-word-pattern spelling, syllables-and-affixes spelling, and derivational-relations spelling. Words Their Way activities range from the late emergent stage (which I suspect the targeted student is at) through the late derivational-relations stage. Students who are in a separate stage from their classmates will be included in a group in the next closest spelling stage but given a differentiated task to meet their needs. A brief period of direct instruction to explain the task will be necessary for all groups/individual students, but after that the Words Their Way activities are hands-on and interactive. Students will be encouraged to work together with their group members while completing the task, and I will step in and offer guidance when necessary.
  1. Resources 

Bear, D. R., Invernizzi, M., Templeton, S., & Johnston, F. (2008). Words their way: Word study for phonics, vocabulary, and spelling instruction. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.

  1. Differentiation Words Their Way is by its very nature differentiated instruction. Rather than students moving through the program as a whole class, the phonics instruction is designed for small ability groups of students to move through at their own pace according to their particular orthographic spelling stage. In these small group lessons, the students that will require the most effort are those who are the only ones in the class and in their group at their particular spelling stage. For example, in the small group consisting of “Nathan,” “Mark,” and “Danny,” the first two are at roughly the same orthographic spelling level but Danny is a full level ahead. In order to differentiate instruction for a student like Danny, it is necessary to select an activity that can be modified to meet his needs as well as the needs of the other group members. For example, having Danny identify the trickier middle sounds in the three-letter sound boxes activity while Nathan and Mark identify the more straightforward beginning and ending sounds will allow all three boys to be challenged.
  1. Adaptations/accommodations for the targeted student  In addition to his academic difficulties, the targeted student has some behavioral challenges, including difficulty following directions. Therefore I will provide the following accommodations as necessary:

-Preferential seating (he will sit next to me)

-Simplify, repeat, and clarify directions

-Student repeats directions for understanding

-Single-step directions

-Frequent redirection

-Extended time (if needed, I will keep him a little longer after his group members finish so that he can successfully complete his task)

*Note: I will utilize the aforementioned accommodations with any child who demonstrates distractibility, hyperactivity, or cognitive processing difficulties during his or her small group lesson. As mentioned above, I will slowly sound out the word several times for any student who has trouble identifying the relevant phonemes.

Evaluation of the lesson: I will know that my targeted student benefited from the lesson if we accomplish at least one of the following two things:

1)He demonstrates an improvement in scores between the pre-assessment and the post-assessment of the Words Their Way primary spelling inventory.

He demonstrates an improvement in scores between the pre-assessment and post-assessment of the letter-sound correspondence test (i.e., he orally identifies the correct sound for at least 17 capital letters and at least 15 lower-case letters.)

Lesson Plan Reflection

Mary Vause

CRIN E22/E10

March 8, 2009

(1)What went well in your lesson?

I think that the lesson went well overall. I felt that I was high-energy and gave a lot of positive reinforcement. I also thought quickly on my toes and altered aspects of the lesson at the last minute based on feedback I received from students. For example, the students were very engaged for the first 10 minutes of the lesson, but after that point the two students with special needs became distracted and began asking “How much longer?” Therefore I wrapped up at the 15 minute mark rather than doing the full 20 minutes I had planned. In order to keep them engaged, I also made a last-minute decision to have them try to spell each word on their mini-whiteboard while they waited their turn. I also felt that having the weakest student provide the initial letter, the next weakest student provide the ending letter, and the strongest student provide the middle sound was a good way to differentiate a single activity.

(2)What could have gone better? Why?

If I had known that I would be cutting five minutes off the lesson I would have selected which words I was using off my list of words ahead of time. As it was I just kind of randomly chose which words not to do from the list, which may have shortchanged one of the students, since each word was selected to address one of the three particular students’ needs (e.g., [e] or [o] sound in the middle of a word, [p] or [b] sound at the end of a word, etc.).

(3)What would you do differently the next time?

In the Words Their Way post-assessment that I took after the lesson, the targeted student actually performed significantly worse than on the pre-assessment, and the other two students performed the same. My cooperating teacher suggested that I try retesting the targeted student in the library where it’s quiet (he had taken the post assessment in a rather noisy room). The one-on-one post-assessment with the targeted student in the library resulted in results equivalent to the pre-assessment. However, the targeted student did show improvement on a re-test of knowledge of letter/sound correspondence. He went from getting the letter/sound correspondence for 12 lower-case letters wrong to getting only 9 wrong. I should note that the targeted student, who has attendance problems, missed five consecutive days of schools between the pre-tests and post-tests for both Words Their Way and letter/sound correspondence, and this may have affected the post-test scores.

Nonetheless, I would have liked to see more improvement from the entire group, and from the targeted student in particular. Something that perplexed me was that the two students with special needs, after pronouncing the three-letter word with me as a group, would write down the incorrect letter on their mini-whiteboards but give me the correct answer verbally. At the time I did not correct their written mistakes because I thought it would have been too time-consuming, but looking back I think I should have because their post-test was written, not verbal, and it appears that although they may give the correct answer verbally for some reason it was not translating into the correct answer on their writing tablets. So in the future, I would put as much emphasis on writing the correct answer as I did on giving the correct answer verbally.