What?
My overarching question looks at how to balance individual attention and hearing every student’s voice with pacing and time efficiency for the whole class. Small groups are easier to balance this dynamic compared to full group, but this is good opportunity to start thinking about it. This 35-minute small group lesson will be on rhyming: words that look and sound similar. This lesson builds off a nursery rhyme activity that the students participated in and will extend/review/reinforce the concept of recognizing and producing rhyming words. Children will be exposed to rhymes and rhyming poetry. This rhyming lesson and “strategy workshop” will help students with benchmark assessments (which asks students to match a picture with another picture that rhymes with it) as well as is inline with the Common Core Standards for Kindergarten. For Halloween students were asked to memorize and present a nursery rhyme. Only a handful of students out of 28 participated in this. This lesson is important because it will extend/review/reinforce rhyming and poetry.
How?
I designed my lesson to frame/begin the lesson with mentioning rhymes and a brief description so students can activate prior knowledge and have their ears ready to hear rhymes in a read aloud of Shel Silverstein’s “Sick.” Using the strategy of interactive writing, I will guide my group to seeing, hearing, and identifying rhymes. Each child in this group represents all levels in the classroom (seminar reading that said different levels were more beneficial). Through interactive writing, we will be able to give individual attention while all others work on constructive activity (individual white board). Students will hear an example of a rhyming poem and create rhyming words on their own. These various modes of learning will allow all children to succeed. Each child having their own white board allows them to work individually in the context of a group setting. The students selected for this group was chosen at random, however, for each student at the large white board, a word/word ending was selected to be on level or slightly challenging for the student. Differentiation/scaffolding is seen in this strategy. Every student is expected to master the same skill (recognizing rhymes as similar word endings), but the practice to get there will vary depending on level of student.
Why?
This task put an emphasis on individual student attention and giving each child the opportunity to share with the group. Rhyming is a concept the students have been introduce to, but could use more practice and reinforcement. This is a good opportunity to show that rhyming words do not always have the same chunk, but rather, same sound. This activity can help with spelling and word recognition so children can “use what they know about familiar parts of words to figure out new words that contain the same [parts]. It is important for children to acquire an increasing bank of quick-and-easy (high-frequency) words, so they can apply their knowledge of the chunks in the words they know to figure out new words” (Franzese, 2002, p. 153). Students will eventually have to present memorized nursery rhymes to the class and this lesson is a good foundation for that assignment. It is important to give each student individual attention but also allow the other students to practice and learn from each other. It is good practice and life skill for individuals to be comfortable in front of groups and speaking in front of others. The younger this skill is implemented, most likely, the less of a big deal it will be viewed as. When students articulate what they think, they are forced to process and think about what they are saying and what it means.