Materials: The Shoe Man written by: Alice
Kunka, shoe chartProcedure: Review the sh=/sh/
correspondence so it will be familiar when
they read The Shoe Man.
I will introduce the lesson. “Would
you run a race wearing high heel shoes?” Class: No! “Wearing
high heel shoes would make you run slowly and it would be difficult for
you to finish the race. Sometimes when we read it is like wearing those
high heel shoes. We stumble through our sentences and trip over unfamiliar
words. We finish, but we get there slowly. If we wear tennis
shoes we can speed right through those sentences and jump right over the
hurdles of difficult words. With lots of practice, we can read books
in record time!” I will model fluent reading using the 100 word excerpt
from The Shoe Man that the students will read. Students will practice
reading on their own and I will call them one by one to come read to me.
Good reading for an average second grader is 80 words per minute, and
115 words per minute for a third grader.
This is the goal the children will work for. After
reading they will find the shoe which best
represents their reading speed. They will then
chart their results. Teachers can create
their own chart based on the target number of words per minute per grade
level. It should give opportunities for several tries. Children
can see whether they are reading at a high heel level, boot level, or sneaker
level. Students will practice reading the text at home that night,
and will try again the next day to see if their reading speed has increased.
The students will continue practicing until they reach the goal, of sixty
words per minute.
Assessment: Compare children’s first try
to their last try at reading the text to see improvement.
References:Eldredge, J. Lloyd. Teaching
Decoding in Holistic Classrooms.
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995
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