You Pick Your Own Book!

Rationale:  This lesson plan is centered on developing a childâs reading fluency.  Fluency deals with reading faster, smoother, more expressively, or more quietly with a goal of reading silently.  In order to help children develop this fluency, there are two approaches teachers use.  One is the direct approach, such as repeated readings, but in this lesson, I chose the indirect approach.  The indirect approach concentrates on the child and his/her voluntary reading.  Throughout this lesson, I will help the child to develop a love and an interest for reading.

Materials: (a recording center for critiques of books) a tape recorder and books.

Procedures:
1. I will begin by introducing the reading material. There will be 5 chapter books to choose from.  I hope to pick books that everyone can find at least one he/she is interested in.  Here are the books:
Hatchet
Shiloh
Sarah, Plain, and Tall
Ramona
Charlotteâs Web
2. I will model how to introduce a book.
For example, Sarah, Plain, and Tall is about a family who loses their mother.  The father desperately seeks help with his two children.  He needs a woman to cook, clean, and tend to the kids.  He places a request for help in a newspaper and a woman who lives by the ocean applies for the job.  She lives in a very different place than the man and his kids.  The family lives on a farm.  She decides to visit and try helping this man, but does it work out?  You will have to read to see if she can take living so far away from home and if she can get along with the family.
3. The children will decide which book they would like to read.  Each child will begin reading the book, but will be discussing their book by certain chapters to keep the ending of the story a secret to the slower readers.  Each day the children will get into groups with those children who are also reading their chosen book.  The group will then discuss by chapters what they read.  I want them to talk about what happened in the story and what they thought about it.  I think this will be fun and encourage voluntary reading.
4. When each group is finished discussing a book, I will ask them to go to the recording center some time throughout the day and give a critique of the book.  I want them to say if they would recommend this book to someone else. This will be helpful for the children to see what they would like to read next.

Children need to develop reading fluency and part of developing this is learning to like reading.  I hope through this lesson that children will want to read.  This is something that can be continuous in a classroom.  Book talks engage the child in interaction with each other and becoming a voluntary reader.
 

Click here to return to Elucidations