This lesson focuses is about deepening meaning of the book. The teacher uses a pointer to track the print, using a fluid motion rather than pointing word-by-word as all students have one-to-one match firmly established. Students join in reading the text aloud with the teacher as they choose. After reading the text through two times, the lesson focus was discussing the beginning, middle, and end [...]

This revisit to the text focuses on vocabulary—noticing interesting and more specific word choices. Students discuss some of the interesting words the author uses in the book and how they brought more specificity to meaning. With each word discussed, there is reading of the sentence on the page to establish meaning, discussion of the vocabulary word, partner talk about the word, and then rereading the [...]

This modeled writing experience gives children an opportunity to hear a writer decide what to write about, how to say the ideas to be written, and to notice strategies and conventions for getting an idea onto paper. The teacher writes about a topic the students would later be writing about during independent work time. After discussing the topic with students, the teacher and students discuss [...]

The first part of this two-part lesson is designed to support students to listen for sounds in words. (This particular sound, the long /e/ sound, was chosen for instruction because there were many examples of words in two well-known books with this sound that used varied spelling patterns to represent the sound.) The teacher revisits two known books, rereading and emphasizing the words with this [...]

In this lesson, students’ attention is drawn to the numerous ways the long /e/ sound is represented in words. The teacher and the students underline the spelling pattern that represents the long /e/ sound.The teacher and students sort some of the words into groups according to the spelling pattern used to represent the long /e/ sound. The lesson focus, asking yourself “does it look right?” [...]