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Comprehension Portfolio by Danielle Saile

Part A: Class Environment

I currently teach first grade in an urban, Title I elementary school in Oklahoma

City, Oklahoma. The school that I teach in houses children in Pre-Kindergarten through

6th grade. My school is one of the smaller ones in the district, with around 275 students.

Our school is a Title I school, but we do not have access to reading teachers. We have

one Instructional Coach.

My class is composed of 17 students. I have 10 boys and 7 girls. My students

come from diverse backgrounds with varied school experiences. In first grade, I have

only 6 students that meet the at/above mark for reading at the Oklahoma Standard. Due

to Oklahoma lowering the bar that is deemed at/above, that shifts when we look at the

national standard. Compared to the national standard for Fountas & Pinnel testing, I

would only have 3 that would meet the standard. I have a few students that have yet to

learn their letters. Additional assessments that students in my first grade class have to

take include district benchmarks that are pushed out to the students through

MasteryConnect. These assessments take a snapshot of where the students are

academically for a certain standard.

There are a few challenges I think I might encounter in teaching comprehension

strategies. One of those challenges is simply time. Due to changes in our district

curriculum and the way our administration is expecting certain curriculum to be taught, it
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can be difficult to get away from that. Another challenge that we see in our school is

simply motivation, and even at a young age, our students don’t tend to see the value in

coming to school due to some families having that specific mindset. We work on getting

students to see that value through showing our own passion in teaching as well as

having incentive programs.

Another challenge that I see would be lack of reading support in my school.

Whether it stems from behavioral challenges that aren’t being met, or lack of support

from families at home, when there’s just one teacher that isn’t receiving the support

necessary to be successful, then it can become a difficult time to reach every student

with the lack of resources and support.

Another challenge would be that so many of my kids are below level that they are

still beginning or emerging readers. The texts they can read on their own level would not

be appropriate to teach comprehension strategies. Therefore, I will need to teach

comprehension strategies based solely on read-alouds. It will not be difficult for me to

arrange my lessons around read-alouds. However, I cannot be sure students will

transfer this to their own reading, and comprehension may be more difficult for students

with language barriers.

A strength that my school has is that it has a large library for a small school and

community partners that want to work with students. Within our library, we have multiple

genres that I can pull from, and we can search within our district’s online catalog to see

the other books each school holds and we are allowed to borrow from other schools.

While we don’t have reading teachers or a librarian, we have many volunteers that
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come into our school to work with individual students or with a small group. These

volunteers read with students during lunch time on books that are on their independent

level and help them grow every week.

Our school has also started implementing many after school activities to help

spark passion from all students. We started our elementary athletic programs through

the Oklahoma City Police Athletic League, where our school competes in sports year

round, and within the past year, we’ve seen an increase in student athlete grades, as

well as having more parental involvement. We also have started after school tutoring,

an art club, a poetry club, and have others on the horizon because we’ve seen these

activities spark students interests in school as a whole.

Another strength my school has to offer is that it supports the workshop model of

teaching. I believe that many of the strategies I am teaching can be taught best in this

model. This gives me the opportunity to teach the lesson, let students practice, and

review with real student experience.

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Part B: Comprehension Strategies

Strategy 1: Making Inferences

Learning Objective: Students will be able to i​ nfer information about a character after

reading a story. They will justify their conclusion with evidence from the text.

Standard: RI.1.1: Ask and answer questions about key details in a text.

Application:

The first strategy I will teach my students to help with comprehension is making

inferences while reading a text. Making inferences is “the ability to read between the

lines or get the meaning an author implies but does not state directly (Stahl, 2014). It is

an important skill to comprehension because it allows a reader to determine the

meanings of unknown words and language, predict then read to confirm or contradict,

draw conclusions or have opinions, understand relationships, and determine the

answers to questions.

In first grade, first graders use visual cues and teacher prompts to make

inferences. Making inferences is a skill that can be very broad, so I tend to use

sentence stems to help prompt their responses. Throughout the year, this tends to

become easier when they have practiced what they need to be looking for. I have

outlined how I will break down this skill to teach.

For the first inference mini-lesson, I will introduce inferencing by making an

anchor chart with “I predict that _______. I say this because ________.” We will then do

​ y Jon Klaussen. While they are already familiar with

a read aloud of ​This Is Not My Hat b
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predictions, they are not yet familiar with making inferences, and are not familiar with

the terminology. With the anchor chart, I will start with their familiar sentence stem of “I

predict that….” From there, I’ll do the second sentence stem,​ "I say this because" and

then they get to tell me why. From there I will explain how we use our context clues to

help us understand characters and our story better.

As we read on, some additional questions I may add on include:

● How do you think the character in the picture feels?

● What makes you think so?

● How does the picture make you feel? Why?

● What do you see in the background of this picture? How is the background

important?

● Why do you think the illustrator used the color _______ for _________?

● What do you think will happen next?

For my second inference mini-lesson, I will create an anchor chart to show a

drawing of my purse. When I write down all of the items that I have on the anchor chart,

students will have an opportunity to discuss and share what type of activities that I enjoy

doing based on the items that are in my purse. For example, if I had an anchor chart

titled: “What’s in Ms. Saile’s bag?”, then as I pulled out items, I would write it out on the

left side of the chart. Before I pull out the items, I would tell my students that they were

going to make inferences on me based on what was inside. I will explain inferencing

and then begin to show them what’s in my bag. As I pull out each item, I would do a

think aloud to help give them an example. As we think aloud, we will use the sentence
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stem, “I can infer that…”. As I pull out items such as keys, a book, wallet, glasses, target

gift card, water, camera, and so forth, I will jot down what students say on the right

column. After this activity, they’ll do an inferencing sheet to infer what they learned

about me.

For the third mini-lesson for inferencing, we will do a brown bag activity that will

release them to do this activity with their peers at their table. Within each bag, there will

be different items. With a recording sheet, they can write (or draw) their observations of

the bag and then write down what they think the item in the bag is. When they finish

doing all of the bags, they can share out their observations and inferences with the rest

of the class.

For my next several lessons, I will focus on making inferences in texts. I plan to

spend at least another week on this comprehension strategy. Each day, I will read a

book and use think aloud strategies to model how I make inferences. In each text, I will

model making at least 3 inferences. While monitoring, I need to ensure that I pay close

attention to my ADHD students. According to work done by Berthiaume, Lorch, Milich

(2010), “failing to monitor ongoing comprehension may lead to formation of incomplete

and erroneous story representations, which would certainly have a deleterious effect on

academic performance for children with ADHD”.

Eventually, we’ll be able to add more fun activities such as an inference crime

scene, and using short films to practice our growing inference skills. I will actively

monitor and look for active participation in including my kids’ schema and guide the

students to make inferences based on evidence I selected and their schema. I expect
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students to start inferencing automatically throughout their independent reading

process, small group, whole group, as well as transferring this knowledge to other

content areas.

Strategy 2: Vocabulary

Learning Objective: Students will be able to​ demonstrate understanding of word

relationships and nuances in word meanings.

Application: RI.1.4: Ask and answer questions to help determine or clarify the meaning

of words and phrases in a text.

The second strategy that I will teach my students to help with comprehension is

through vocabulary. Our data has shown that our students have low vocabulary skills

across the board. This includes oral, reading, and writing. When implementing

vocabulary strategies, I will need to focus on Tier 1, 2, and 3 words.

To introduce this strategy, I will explain to my students how important word

choice is and how what we say matters. For the first vocabulary mini-lesson, I will start

​ y Peter Reynolds. We will create a chart prior to

out with reading ​The Word Collector b

reading, discuss what types of items that my students collect, and we will record

everything that they do collect. Prior to reading the book, I will choose a few words to

explain as we go through the book. With those words, we will create a place in our

classroom after we read, such as our window or our door, to write down words that we

hear and learn to put on a note card and collect our own set of words.
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For the second vocabulary mini-lesson, we will delve deeper into vocabulary

strategies and guide students through using an anticipation guide for the book we plan

​ y Stephen Whitt, adapted by

to read, which will be from ​A House of Snow and Ice b

Jessica Fries-Gaither. I will pick out a few words to focus on, which will be blocks (Tier

2-multiple meaning), survive (Tier 3), and igloo (Tier 3). Graves et al. (2014) ​suggested

that there are three tiers of words and that most attention should be focused on the

middle tier, Tier Two. They define Tier Two words as those that have “high utility for

mature language users and are found across a variety of domains”.​ On the anticipatory

guide, students will read and answer yes and no statements about the text. Vocabulary

words are infused into the anticipatory guide in order to start having think about the

words that they are going to read about in the text. After we answer yes and no on our

anticipatory guide, they can add on what they learned if they were wrong and use the

specific vocabulary words that we worked on.

A third mini-lesson would include changing the way I use certain words within the

classroom. Knowing that not just reading and writing vocabulary does not encompass

everything about vocabulary, I know that speaking vocabulary is also low. One way I

can work on that is by using sophisticated words during classroom routines and while

discussing classroom behavior and performances. According to Lane and Allen (2010),

“​Simplistic vocabulary may be appropriate for initial instruction, as a support for

students’ understanding of a new concept. But once students develop a basic

understanding, it is time to elevate our instructional language to enhance our students’

vocabulary.”
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As the year progresses, I will scaffold vocabulary words within the classroom,

through procedures, behavior, and academic routines. I expect to see improvement in

reading, writing, and oral vocabulary both in and out of the classroom.

Strategy 3: Writing to Learn

​ articipate in shared research and writing

Learning Objective: Students will be able to p

projects.

Standard: W.1.7: Participate in shared research and writing projects.

Application:

The third strategy that I will teach my students to help with comprehension is

using writing to learn activities. Writing to learn “engages students, extends thinking,

deepens understanding, and energizes the meaning-making process” (Knipper &

Duggan, 2006).

In this article, Knipper and Duggan discuss incorporating writing to learn across

all content area classes. One creative writing-to-learn activities that I would like to

incorporate into my classroom to increase comprehension would be to use biopoems. A

biopoem requires students to think carefully about the content of the text and make

inferences about what a historical figure’s actions and statements imply. With the age

group that I work with, I would adapt the poem to have less required lines and we would

create it together as a class after reading a text. We will begin by starting with rereading

a book with a main character that we know well. One book that we are used to

rereading is ​Chrysanthemum​ by Kevin Henkes. With this book, we will use it to talk
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about Chrysanthemum using the template for separate lines: Name, adjectives (3

things), lover of (3 people or things), looks like (3 descriptive words), name again. We

will use biopoems in different subjects and using different books, and adapt the

template for what best fits our needs. The second week of doing biopoems, we will

break down to writing our own biopoems about themselves. Each day we will focus on a

line or two. After having teacher guidance for the poem for a week, students will be able

to independently write their own poem about a member of their family or their pet.

Another writing to learn activity that we will incorporate into our learning that will

take up at least two weeks amount of time, is to create information books on a variety of

topics. For the first week, I will read a different book every day on a certain topic. For

October, we will be studying bats. For the first day, I will read both nonfiction and fiction

books about bats, and we will create a running list of characteristics of bats that we

hear. For the rest of the week, each day we will focus on a different aspect of bats (what

they eat, where they live, etc.) and create a small informational article on the topic.

By the end of the week, we will have a published work. Duke, et al. (2006) states,

“students wrote information books on a variety of science topics for their school

libraries, for “next year’s class,” “for the kindergartners” (who were often willing

listeners), and for numerous other classes in their schools. For each of these writing

events, which always required background reading, the teachers made sure that the

students knew there was a real audience and that the texts would be read by that

audience.” For the second week, we will work on creating their own books over a topic
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they were most interested in. At the end of the week, they’ll share with a kindergarten

class on the informational text that they created.

As their experiences in writing grow, we will expand on more authentic writing to

learn activities. When I look at students’ writings, I will be looking for the content they

put in their writing to begin with. As they grow as writers, I will begin checking for

grammar and spelling.

Conclusion:

In my goal to improve reading comprehension in my first grade classroom, I know

that there will be strengths and challenges that I must address. It is important that we

set a good foundation early on to work on these strategies so that we may scaffold upon

their learning as they go up in grades. Therefore I plan to teach inferences, vocabulary

and writing to learn learning strategies to ensure reading comprehension success.

Appendix A: ​Anticipation Guide for A House of Snow and Ice

Yes No

People live in igloos year

round.

Inuit hunters build igloos

with just their bare hands.

A person can stand on a

well-built igloo.

Igloos are made up of

blocks of wood.

Inuits live in igloos while

they are on hunting trips.
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Hunters can survive in an

igloo.

Appendix B: Mystery Bag Data Sheet

https://www.scholastic.com/teachers/blog-posts/alycia-zimmerman/mystery-bags-develo

p-observation-and-inference-skills/

Appendix C: Biopoem Template

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https://freeology.com/wp-content/files/biopoem.pdf

Appendix D: Storyline.com

http://www.storyline.com/resources/ipy/clips/ipy_0910_01_igloo_01517.html
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Works Cited:

Berthiaume, K. S., Lorch, E. P., & Milich, R. (2010). Inferential processing and

comprehension monitoring in boys with ADHD. Journal of Attention Disorder, 14(1),

31–42.

Duke, et al. (2006). Authentic literacy activities for developing comprehension and

writing. The Reading Teacher, 60(4), 344-355.

Graves et al. (2014). Words, words, everywhere but which ones do we teach? The

Reading Teacher, 67(5), 333-346.

Knipper, K.J., & Duggan, T.J. (2006). Writing to learn across the curriculum: Tools for

comprehension in content area classes. The Reading Teacher, 59(5), 462 - 470.

Lane, H. B., Allen, S. A. (2010). The vocabulary-rich classroom: Modeling sophisticated

word use to promote word consciousness and vocabulary growth. The Reading

Teacher, 63(5), 352–370.

Stahl, K. A. (2014). Fostering inference generation with emergent and novice readers.

The Reading Teacher, 67(5), 384-388.