online class

For my mini lessons, I'm focusing on two different sets of students depending on the mini lesson. I haven't written up my mini lessons on the blog post but the first deals with visual imagery and the students creating visual representations of a specific excerpt from a book.  They will then compare and explain their pictures and why they drew them that way. For this mini lesson, the two students I chose are bright students but tend to lose focus during reading. This mini lesson is designed to to strengthen their comprehension techniques. By giving them a "fun" task of drawing,  they can begin to learn and develop this idea of "visualizing the text".  Hopefully this will bring the students to listen closer to the text and become more engaged rather than trailing off.
The second mini lesson relates to creating summaries. This task will involve creating a "web" of ideas relating to a passage, and finding the connections between them. The two students I have chosen for this task also struggle with comprehension. The students have a hard time making meaning out of the text and figuring out the important parts or "main ideas" in readings. I work with these students a lot on their social studies questions which have a lot to do with summarizing, and they seem to always be lost and needing someone directly next to them in order for them to complete their work. I'm hoping by using this idea of the "web" and having the students write down everything they can think of and remember about the passage, they can begin to differentiate between main ideas and begin to form ways to summarize better.

In my classroom when it comes to:
Classroom-based reading instruction: My teacher uses kits of leveled booked to determine students reading levels. Everyday the students do "centers" in specific groups. The students don't know this but their groups are made up of students of the same "level" as them when it comes to reading. For each group, the books, questions and ideas that the students are focusing on are different. These students meet with their groups and the teacher in one of the center's where they participate in guided reading with her. I'm not specifically sure what type of assessment my teacher does relating to the guided readings, as I'm always helping with another center.
Portfolio Assessment: As for portfolio assessment, I really am not sure what my teacher does for this either. I have heard her mention students portfolios, but I'm assuming she keeps some of the students work from every so often in there.
High Stakes testing: When it comes to preparing for high stakes testing, a lot of my mentor teachers writing prompts deal with prompts similar to what students would have to write about during the MEAPs, and other similar tests. The students don't normally participate in practice tests as the book touches upon, but the teacher does create prompts similar to ones found in standardized testing. The last prompt I was there for dealt with recalling a time you experienced something new, or had a new experience and writing about it. Another prompt dealt with taking a stand on an issue and writing a letter to the principle about it. The majority of their writing has to deal with preparation for high stakes testing.

I think that an additional approach that would be helpful in guiding my instruction would be doing something relating to running records or informal reading inventories. This would help me to pin point where exactly these students fall, and to better determine an instructional level passage for the students to be comprehending. These would also show me if the comprehension issue is being caused by the students fluency abilities.