Observation Report #5

TC Name: Katie Schmucker

RICA Domain: Fluency

RICA Competency: Reading Fluency-Rate, Accuracy, and Prosody

Grade Level: 2nd

Any Additional Descriptors: Self-contained class with one EL

INSTRUCTION:

                I observed Mrs. R teaching fluency to her class of second graders. She began by telling them to get out their reading anthologies and to open up to the story entitled “Julius.” She then clearly established her student expectations by telling her class that today they would be working on fluency and expression while reading. She explained rate saying that having fluency is reading without pausing. She said that language has a rhythm to it and when we read, sentences should sound the same as when we speak.

                She then addressed accuracy. She asked the class what they could do if they came across a word that they didn’t know. Students volunteered two correct answers: you can sound out the word or look for context clues to figure out what the sentence is about to decode it’s meaning.

                Mrs. R then flipped through the story “Julius” and assigned each student a page to read. She told them to take a few minutes to read through their page a couple times and practice saying the words and to work on their reading fluency. She told them she expected them to read with accuracy and correct rate when it was time to read the story out loud.

                The last thing Mrs. R told the class to work on was prosody. She explained that when you read you should read with expression. She modeled what this should sound like when they read. She also modeled how it would sound if they read without fluency and prosody and how boring it would be and how choppy it would sound.

                After giving the class a few minutes to practice reading their page, she had the first student, assigned to the first page, begin reading. The students read with fluency and moderate prosody. They started reading their assigned page immediately after the person before them finished, without having to be prompted or reminded to read. The children responded well to this activity and seemed more prepared and less nervous than other forms of class read alouds, such as “popcorn” reading.

                After reading, the class completed reading comprehension questions together from the end of the story. The class actively participated in answering the questions and provided correct answers. Mrs. R then read each vocabulary word from the chapter and asked the students to act out the meaning of the words. For example, for the word “slurp” she had them pretend to slurp soup out of a bowl. After the vocabulary TPR lesson, Mrs. R gave the class a quiz on the story “Julius.”

INSTRUCTIONAL SETTING:

                Within the instructional setting the only resource students needed was their anthology. There were no written cues or aids present in the room that pertained to this lesson.