Preservice Teacher: Delaney Brigman

School: Nathaniel Alexander Elementary School

Grade: 3rd
Small Group Lesson Write Up

The identification of the area/aspect of literacy you are choosing to

develop/support and an explanation of how you determined this need within the
class you are teaching, including references to curriculum, student performance,
and classroom climate/environment.
For my small group lesson, the identification area I chose to support was on using
context clues and supporting details to help students identify a word and what is
happening in the story, as well as in the illustrations. My teacher has been working on
different types of context clues and strategies to help students figure out a word and
comprehend what is happening in what they are reading about. One of the main
strategies that the teacher has been working on with the students is finding supporting
details for their answers. Some of the types of questions and strategies that I worked on
with the students for my whole group reading lesson are worked on with these students
that I pulled for the small group. The teacher and I both chose 5 students who have been
struggling with using context clues and these strategies. These students have some of
the lower reading levels in the class and need a little extra help when it comes to
comprehending what they are reading about. 3 out of these 5 students were ELL
students.
The materials required to implement this instruction, including student and
teacher resources.
Each student will need a chromebook to access their Razkids account in order to read
along with the folktale The Disappearing Moon. If the students do not have access to
chromebooks then print out a copy of the folktale The Disappearing Moon for each
student. The teacher will also have the folktale displayed on the smartboard for the
students to interact with while answering the multiple choice questions. The teacher and
the 5 students will read through the folktale together. The teacher will hand out a copy of
a worksheet with 7 multiple choice questions on it to each student.
Materials: 5 chromebooks (or 5 copies of The Disappearing Moon), a smart board, 6
worksheets with multiple choice questions
 The intended/hopeful outcomes of this intervention.
The intended outcome of this intervention is to have students gain more knowledge on
how to use context clues and supporting details when they are reading and answering
questions on what they have read. Students will hopefully be able to use these context
clues to help them better comprehend what they have read and use the supporting
details they have found to help them answer questions regarding the text.
A reflection on the results (both successful and challenges) of the
implementation of this intervention and modification you would make for future
implementations (to be completed after clinical experience).
After having taught this small group lesson, I am thrilled with how well this lesson went
and I am so proud of the students that were in the small group. Even though these
students struggle in general when it comes to reading and comprehension, with a little
bit of help from me and some of their classmates, these students were able to read the
folktale The Disappearing Moon out loud to the rest of the small group students without
much help for figuring out words they did not know. As we read through the folktale, I
made sure to stop after each section and ask the students what was going on in the
story to help them better comprehend what they were reading. By the time we finished
reading the story, the students were able to tell me the main ideas in the story and what
exactly it was about.
When we were answering the multiple choice questions to practice using our
context clues and supporting details, students were quickly and accurately able to
answer questions 1-5 with hardly any struggle at all. Questions 1-5 focused on having
the students define a word that was used in the folktale. In order for students to answer
these questions, they had to go back into the folktale and find the sentence that used the
word the question was addressing. I had the students underline/highlight the sentence
on their chromebooks and had one student come up to the smartboard to
underline/highlight the sentence for the rest of the students in the small group to see. I
then made sure that the students read through all of the answer choices to see which
one best answered the question being asked. I modeled how to answer the first question
for the students but the students were able to take turns talking me and the other
students through how to answer the other questions. They got all of these answers
correct with little difficulty in using supporting details and context clues to help them
figure out how to answer these questions.
Once the students got to question number 6 they hit a wall. Questions number 6
and 7 focused on looking at the pictures in the folktale and using context clues and
supporting details to help them figure out what is happening in the story. Students had a
difficult time figuring out which answer choices they could eliminate because they were
trying to look only at the picture and not use the text and supporting details to help them
answer the question. Some of the answer choices were also talked about in the text but
were being shown in other pictures in the folktale so the students had to make sure they
were looking at the correct picture being asked about in the question. I helped the
students get through this problem by talking through each answer choice. We went
through and looked at the answer choices that may have corresponded with another
picture in the story but we had to ask ourselves if that was the picture that the question
we were trying to answer was talking about. Once the students were able to answer
question 6 correctly, they went on to question 7 which was the same type of question.
The students did not struggle at all with question 7 because they were able to remember
the process they used to help them answer question 6.
One modification that I could have made for the students is providing the ELL
students with the passage in their first language as well as in English, although I do not
think that these students needed it. One thing that I would have done differently if I
taught this small group lesson again is before getting into the main bulk of the lesson, I
would introduce what standard we will be working on with the students and remind them
of what some of the different strategies are that we can use and keep in mind when we
are answering these types of questions.
Overall, I am very pleased with how this lesson turned out and I think that this
lesson definitely helped these 5 students better understand how to answer questions like
the ones we worked on in the small group using context clues and supporting details.
They also know that if they have the text in front of them to use when they are answering
the questions, then they should utilize it. It is there to help them.