Tuchek Reading Lesson Overview

For my first lesson I’m going to be working with C and E. Before we were given this assignment, I already knew that these two students struggled with their reading and I’ve worked several times with E during Reading Workshop on his fluency skills. I asked my CT if there were any particular students that needed to spend a little extra time on any literacy areas, and she immediately got very excited and informed me about the new CORE Phonics Survey that their school (Midway Elementary School) was testing out. Before I began constructing my lesson, I met with the Midway’s reading specialist and talked to her for a while about CORE’s material and why she thought it was so important to start looking at students’ emerging literacy skills before looking at anything else that would’ve been developed later in their schooling. Her reasoning for this, is that students usually tackle phonics and phonemic awareness in lower elementary, but sometimes there are students who slip by without fully mastering these skills which are the foundation for everything else. Without these skills, students like C and E, struggle through all of elementary school and beyond with literacy, more specifically, letter and sound relationships and reading and decoding.

For my second lesson I’m going to be working with J, C, E, and M who are all boys and are average or below-average readers. Like my first lesson, I asked my CT if there were any particular students that needed to spend a little extra time on any literacy areas, and she let me know of a new “game” that she found out about from the school’s reading specialist that helps students develop their decoding and sound-letter relationships. I decided to use this lesson on these four students because all though they definitely aren’t the lowest level readers in the class, they aren’t the highest either so they don’t benefit from the one-on-one help/attention that some of the other students receive, and they all have difficulty recognizing unfamiliar words and finding relationships between words. With that being said, I think it’s important to teach this lesson to students that might need a little extra help even though they aren’t struggling, but still need the practice to strengthen their skills and see what areas they still need help with after the lesson is over.