Student Overview

Sarah is a third grade student attending a Title One elementary school. Last year,

she was dual identified as ELL and Special Education. She struggles daily with

language, writing and reading. Currently, Sarah receives small group reading SpEd

support, small group reading and language ELL support, and LLI (Leveled Literacy

Intervention). Sarah reads at a 1.8 level. Despite her challenges, Sarah has a lot of

great strengths that she contributes daily to her education. Sarah is excellent at

decoding, which allows her to have a high accuracy percentage during fluency

assessments. Also, when the text is read to her, Sarah can comprehend on grade level.

Finally, Sarah is excellent at math and is always contributing to classroom discussions.

According to the student interest interview, Sarah really likes to do art. Her favorite

types of book are ones about animals. When Sarah is not at school, she enjoys being

outside and playing with her neighborhood friends.

Lessons

The four lessons completed with Sarah focused on language expression and the

five components of reading phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, fluency, and

comprehension. Also, we focused on writing because it is an area Sarah really struggles

with. The books chosen for the lessons were non-fiction to help build Sarahs prior

knowledge.

Phonemic Awareness and Phonics For any multi-syllabic word in the text, students

are to count the syllables in the words. With Single syllable words, students are to find

familiar parts in the word to decode it.

Vocabulary Key vocabulary words for the text and reinforced with visuals.

Fluency Books are read twice. First, the book is read together. Then, the student

independently reads it.

Comprehension Series of questions are discussed with students. Student can verbally

respond.

Writing Written expression is done through dictation. Student is to encourage to edit

work after writing and to reference text for correct spelling.

Reflections

The resources I used the most for planning my lessons were, Literacy

Development with English Learners and Writing Between Languages: How English

Language Learners Make the Transition to Fluency. Also, I used articles from

educational/ELL journals. Most of the resources encouraged teachers to use visuals

during the lessons, which is what I did. It helped Sarah better understand the words

being taught and to improve comprehension.

Phonemic Awareness and Phonics

Before teachers can start phonics instruction, students need to be skilled in

phonemic awareness. Phonemic awareness is the ability to isolate individual sounds in

a word. Master phonemic awareness is essential for efficient reading and learning the

alphabet code of the English language (Helman, 2016, 144). Phonics cannot be busy

work. Often teachers have students copy random spelling words, but this is not

effective. Phonics work needs to be engaging and purposeful, which can be done with
hands on activities like word sorts, games, students using their bodies and voices, as

well as interactions with fellow students (Helman, 2016, p. 173). Though vocabulary is a

key part in balanced literacy, you can never have too much emphasis on vocabulary

opportunities. The text suggests when working on phonics, to also incorporate

vocabulary instruction. This will also help make phonics more meaningful and

understandable. To incorporate vocabulary into phonics, teachers can discuss the

words before sorting (Helman, 2016, p. 174).

Vocabulary

The question often asked by teachers regarding vocabulary instruction is, What

words do I choose to teach? Teachers need to find a happy median of words that are

essential to the text, words that will increase academic language and words students

will see elsewhere (Silverman & et al., 2016, p. 238). The vocabulary instruction chapter

offered a lot of great ideas and suggestions to help students retain vocabulary. But what

stands out is using multiple modalities for instruction. This applies to all literacy content

areas. Teachers can take the following steps when teaching new vocabulary words: 1.

Say the word and have students say it back. 2. Show the word and discuss word

patterns and sounds. 3. Provide an easy to understand definition of the word. 4. Show

actions and pictures of the word. 5. Provide examples of the words across the content

areas.

Fluency

The lesson plans focused on FOOR, Fluency-Oriented Oral Reading, for fluency

instruction. With this method, students read a single type of text over the course of the
week. Every day, there is a new way of reading the text. Whether it be chorale reading,

echo reading, partner reading and independent reading (Montero & Kuhn, 2016, p. 199

200). The goal of repeated reading is to increase the speed of word recognition and

make decoding of the words automatic, thus enabling the students to concentrate on

the meaning of the text (Rubin, 2016). Being able to read fluently is an essential skill to

help kids build vocabulary, comprehension and interest in books (Montero & Kuhn,

2016, p. 201).

Comprehension

Comprehension is a very difficult task for students, especially when they cannot

accurately and fluently read the text. With comprehension, it is essential to do a think

aloud process. Strategies for comprehension should be modeling, explaining and

thinking aloud before expecting students to answer comprehension questions on their

own (Brock & et al, 2016, p. 226). Also, it is essential to provide tools and resources to

assist with comprehension. In one article, they recommended using summary frames as

a method to increase comprehension (Honnert & Bozan, 2005). The final suggestion is

to use collaborative communities to build comprehension. ELL teachers and general

education teachers should always be working together to build students comprehension

(Brock & et al., 2016, p. 227).

Writing

Like comprehension, learning to write is a hard skill to learn and teach. What

resonated was the Valdes Model for writing. This model requires to start instruction with

what students know. To enhance writing development, we need to start from what
students can do. We must not only legitimize any transition in their development but

also provide support and guidance as they hone their writing skills at each transitional

stage(Fu, 2009). In the Fu text, it stressed that it is important for students to write in

their native language first before writing in English. I thought this was very interesting,

but also appropriate. At the elementary level, not many students come in as a fluent

writer in their native language since they are so young (Fu, 2009).
 References

Fu, D. (2009). Writing Between Languages: How English Language Learners Make the

Transition to Fluency, Grades 4-12. Portsmouth: Heinemann.

Helman, L. (2016). Literacy development with English learners: research-based

instruction in grades K-6. New York: Guilford Press.

Honnert, A. M., & Bozan, S. E. (2005). Summary Frames: Language Acquisition for

Special Education and ELL Students. Science Activities: Classroom Projects and

Curriculum Ideas,42(2), 19-29

Rubin, D. I. (2016). Growth in Oral Reading Fluency of Spanish ELL Students With

Learning Disabilities. Intervention in School and Clinic,52(1), 34-38.