Online Class

For each of my two mini-lessons I worked with two students. I had group 1 do a text-to-self activity and group 2 do a big ideas activity. I used assessment information from my language arts lesson (discussion and post-reading activity) to determine which students struggled most in these two important areas because making text-to-self connections and identifying big ideas were central to my lesson and I noticed that some of the students struggled. Furthermore, the students that I grouped are similar in reading ability, which I found from working with them in my reading center and talking with my MT (formative assessment). I thought it would be most interesting for me to use my own assessment information to diagnose what further instruction was needed.
My text-to-self lesson involved asking the students pre-reading comprehension questions in order to have them thinking about the big ideas of the short story and to activate their background knowledge. I asked them to think about any similarities or differences between the content of the text and their own experiences (with family vacations). For the post-reading activity, I had the students write a short journal entry about the similarities and differences they found. I used a journal entry as a simplified connections chart that only discusses text-to-self connections (not text-to-text or text-to-world which are also included in a typical connections chart) (Tompkins, p. 254). The journal entry is also a strategy that can be used to practice making text-to-self connections (Tompkins, p. 123).
My big ideas activity involved asking the students pre-reading comprehension questions to draw their attention to the big ideas of the short story and activate background knowledge, and making a prediction about what the story was going to be about based on the title ("What Can I Have for My Toy?" QRI-5, p. 211). This is helpful because it "directs students toward the big ideas" (Tompkins, p. 263). For the post-reading activity, I had the students make a graphic organizer depicting the beginning, middle, and end of the story using pictures and then had them explain it to me. I had the students thinking about the plot, characters, and setting as a way to focus on big ideas (Tompkins, p. 263).
In my placement, the teacher does classroom-based reading instruction with running records, leveled books, observation, note taking, and on-the-spot conferences. Unfortunately, I don't think the students have their own portfolios where they store their work throughout the year. I think this is a really cool idea and definitely something I will do in my own classroom. The only high-stakes testing the students do is through the school for grade-wide progress monitoring. Since they are only in 1st grade, they don't do national standardized tests.
I could have used my MT's notes to inform my instruction. Unfortunately, most of her assessments look at fluency and not so much at other skills like identifying big ideas and text-to-self connections. However, we probably could have discussed her observations with these skills that she has seen throughout the year.