Observations, Reflections and Next Steps
Response to Observer's Notes:
I feel better about the lesson after conferencing with my observer than how I did in the moment teaching it. As I expected, much of what was noted had to do with classroom management, both positive and negative. It was frustrating how much time I did indeed have to spend on managing behavior. I'm sure part of it had to do with it being the last period of the day before Thanksgiving break. However, I would agree with my observer that although things were a bit loud and rowdy, there was for the most part true engagement. When one student became disengaged, rather than demand her attention, I chose to let her come back to us on her own (as I knew she would) and then positively reinforce her participation and involvement thereafter. In regards to the suggestion to have my students be more active during the read aloud, I have mixed feelings. While I agree that my students clearly needed to move and sitting still was difficult for them, I also know that it could have made things even wilder. It's a tough balance to strike with my students. Also having students act out the gestures or what was happening in the book may have prevented them from being able to use the silent signal for recognizing rhyme. I believe that doing the actions would actually remove focus from recognizing rhyme and they would have distracted and less successful in recalling the instances of rhyme from the book afterward. In terms of student learning that was noted, I agree that students were successfully signaling during the read aloud and were able to successfully recall rhyme from the book and identify similar letter patterns in the rhyming words recalled.
I feel better about the lesson after conferencing with my observer than how I did in the moment teaching it. As I expected, much of what was noted had to do with classroom management, both positive and negative. It was frustrating how much time I did indeed have to spend on managing behavior. I'm sure part of it had to do with it being the last period of the day before Thanksgiving break. However, I would agree with my observer that although things were a bit loud and rowdy, there was for the most part true engagement. When one student became disengaged, rather than demand her attention, I chose to let her come back to us on her own (as I knew she would) and then positively reinforce her participation and involvement thereafter. In regards to the suggestion to have my students be more active during the read aloud, I have mixed feelings. While I agree that my students clearly needed to move and sitting still was difficult for them, I also know that it could have made things even wilder. It's a tough balance to strike with my students. Also having students act out the gestures or what was happening in the book may have prevented them from being able to use the silent signal for recognizing rhyme. I believe that doing the actions would actually remove focus from recognizing rhyme and they would have distracted and less successful in recalling the instances of rhyme from the book afterward. In terms of student learning that was noted, I agree that students were successfully signaling during the read aloud and were able to successfully recall rhyme from the book and identify similar letter patterns in the rhyming words recalled.
Learning from Multiple Implementations
Context for Lessons:
1) First Grade - 6 students of mixed ability level (low-high)
2) Second Grade - students of low-middle ability level
3) Kindergarten - students of middle - high ability level
Revisions to the Lesson
1) First Grade - 6 students of mixed ability level (low-high)
2) Second Grade - students of low-middle ability level
3) Kindergarten - students of middle - high ability level
Revisions to the Lesson
A Successful Hook
As we all reflected on our lesson implementation, we realized that the hook remained in tact and worked well for engaging students at each grade level. It is also not surprising that their reaction was quite similar with students laughing and surprised by our silliness. This successfully set a tone of learning together being fun, which we all benefited from.
One of the interesting differences in the choices we made was that we chose to set up the space for the read aloud differently. In first grade I had gathered students on the rug where we do morning meeting. However it was the end of the day and they had been at their desks for hours at that point and sitting still on the rug was quite difficult for them. So when Ariana did her lesson in second grade, she chose to have them seated in chairs forming a circle. Then Ji-Young chose to sit with the students at a small round table, almost like a guided reading set up. After seeing and hearing about their set up, it makes me question my previous assumption that read aloud activities should be done on the rug for young students.
Informal and Formative Assessment of Student Understanding
All three of us did an introduction to the lesson before reading aloud. I had asked students to provide examples of rhyme as a quick formative assessment of their knowledge of the concept of rhyme and realized that the majority of my students could provide me with examples. So in second grade, when Ariana did a similar formative assessment she was glad she had done so, because she realized her students were not confident with the concept and gave her inaccurate examples of rhyme. So in second grade, there was an in the moment change to spend a substantial amount of time reviewing what rhyme was before doing the read aloud and she chose to focus just on rhyming instead of adding the vocabulary component that had been planned. Ji-Young also noted the need for a quick formative assessment and used the title of the book to gauge her students phonemic awareness for beginning letter sounds.
Both myself and Ariana, really liked the choice to give a silent signaling task before listening to the read aloud. It successfully focused their attention and increased engagement. However, from my implementation in first grade we learned the importance of recognizing the behavior with positive reinforcement throughout the reading to remind them of the task and to have students be models for each other. Ji-Young made the choice with her younger kindergarten students to not use a signal but clearly emphasize the beginning letter sounds with her read aloud voice and to elicit responses to questions about the sounds they were hearing on many pages. This made for a slower but more interactive reading than what I had originally done with my first graders.
Following the read aloud. Both Arianna and I wanted to do another quick informal assessment check to see if students had picked up on the rhyme. When I asked my first grade students to recall the rhyming words they heard in the book, they were able to respond with several examples from the book. However, when Ariana asked the same thing, her second grade students struggled to recall any of the rhyme from the book and asked to see the book again to look for the examples.
As we all reflected on our lesson implementation, we realized that the hook remained in tact and worked well for engaging students at each grade level. It is also not surprising that their reaction was quite similar with students laughing and surprised by our silliness. This successfully set a tone of learning together being fun, which we all benefited from.
One of the interesting differences in the choices we made was that we chose to set up the space for the read aloud differently. In first grade I had gathered students on the rug where we do morning meeting. However it was the end of the day and they had been at their desks for hours at that point and sitting still on the rug was quite difficult for them. So when Ariana did her lesson in second grade, she chose to have them seated in chairs forming a circle. Then Ji-Young chose to sit with the students at a small round table, almost like a guided reading set up. After seeing and hearing about their set up, it makes me question my previous assumption that read aloud activities should be done on the rug for young students.
Informal and Formative Assessment of Student Understanding
All three of us did an introduction to the lesson before reading aloud. I had asked students to provide examples of rhyme as a quick formative assessment of their knowledge of the concept of rhyme and realized that the majority of my students could provide me with examples. So in second grade, when Ariana did a similar formative assessment she was glad she had done so, because she realized her students were not confident with the concept and gave her inaccurate examples of rhyme. So in second grade, there was an in the moment change to spend a substantial amount of time reviewing what rhyme was before doing the read aloud and she chose to focus just on rhyming instead of adding the vocabulary component that had been planned. Ji-Young also noted the need for a quick formative assessment and used the title of the book to gauge her students phonemic awareness for beginning letter sounds.
Both myself and Ariana, really liked the choice to give a silent signaling task before listening to the read aloud. It successfully focused their attention and increased engagement. However, from my implementation in first grade we learned the importance of recognizing the behavior with positive reinforcement throughout the reading to remind them of the task and to have students be models for each other. Ji-Young made the choice with her younger kindergarten students to not use a signal but clearly emphasize the beginning letter sounds with her read aloud voice and to elicit responses to questions about the sounds they were hearing on many pages. This made for a slower but more interactive reading than what I had originally done with my first graders.
Following the read aloud. Both Arianna and I wanted to do another quick informal assessment check to see if students had picked up on the rhyme. When I asked my first grade students to recall the rhyming words they heard in the book, they were able to respond with several examples from the book. However, when Ariana asked the same thing, her second grade students struggled to recall any of the rhyme from the book and asked to see the book again to look for the examples.
Differentiated Activities
Each of us did an activity following the read aloud. We had all originally planned to do a guessing game with notecards on foreheads but realized after some reflection that I didn't think my students could manage that well. So I made a last minute change from a guessing game to a memory game. Students were supposed to have the cards face down and look one at a time for matches. This didn't last long and all the students ended up turning all the cards over and just looking for matches together from the same pile of words. Ariana, saw the difficulty my students had with memory and also chose to just do a matching activity. Except Ariana made her activity more collaborative by giving each student a pile with words that were half of a rhyming pair (their classmate had the matching word). So they had to collaborate to find the matches, unlike my activity where we just found matches from the one big group at the same time. Ariana's lesson therefore, may have avoided some of the competition problems that started to happen with my first graders. Ji-Young made the decision last minute to still do the guessing game in pairs but not let them go and work in pairs alone. She had each pair do their guesses in front of the small group as if they were an audience for a game show. It was a very creative way to make the game more manageable for kindergarten. The students in all grades seemed to like the activity and told all of us so after the implementations.
Overall Observations of Student Learning
One thing that stuck out to all three of us during our implementation is how the students seemed to be confused and thrown off by assigning one letter or group of letters to one particular sound. In the first grade lesson for example, two girls wanted to call "heels" and "feet" rhyming words and gave the justification that they both had two "e"s. The same misconception of rhyme having to do with specific letters (not sounds) came up again in the second grade lesson with the words "heels", "wheels", "week" and "beak". The confusion stemmed from the fact that the "ee" letter group does not always make the same sound within words, depending on what other letters are with it. In kindergarten, there was one student who similarly struggled with "socks" and "box". They do sound like rhyme but the letters making those sounds are "cks" and "x". The student had said she heard the "x" sound in the word "socks" and that was a confusing moment for everyone. I think with the next implementation of this lesson, we will really need to emphasize more that rhyme has to do with the sounds you hear not necessarily matching the letter combinations you see. After having explained this to our students on the fly during the game, prompting them to vocalize the words and listen for similar sounds, they caught on and were mostly successful at identifying rhyming pairs.
Each of us did an activity following the read aloud. We had all originally planned to do a guessing game with notecards on foreheads but realized after some reflection that I didn't think my students could manage that well. So I made a last minute change from a guessing game to a memory game. Students were supposed to have the cards face down and look one at a time for matches. This didn't last long and all the students ended up turning all the cards over and just looking for matches together from the same pile of words. Ariana, saw the difficulty my students had with memory and also chose to just do a matching activity. Except Ariana made her activity more collaborative by giving each student a pile with words that were half of a rhyming pair (their classmate had the matching word). So they had to collaborate to find the matches, unlike my activity where we just found matches from the one big group at the same time. Ariana's lesson therefore, may have avoided some of the competition problems that started to happen with my first graders. Ji-Young made the decision last minute to still do the guessing game in pairs but not let them go and work in pairs alone. She had each pair do their guesses in front of the small group as if they were an audience for a game show. It was a very creative way to make the game more manageable for kindergarten. The students in all grades seemed to like the activity and told all of us so after the implementations.
Overall Observations of Student Learning
One thing that stuck out to all three of us during our implementation is how the students seemed to be confused and thrown off by assigning one letter or group of letters to one particular sound. In the first grade lesson for example, two girls wanted to call "heels" and "feet" rhyming words and gave the justification that they both had two "e"s. The same misconception of rhyme having to do with specific letters (not sounds) came up again in the second grade lesson with the words "heels", "wheels", "week" and "beak". The confusion stemmed from the fact that the "ee" letter group does not always make the same sound within words, depending on what other letters are with it. In kindergarten, there was one student who similarly struggled with "socks" and "box". They do sound like rhyme but the letters making those sounds are "cks" and "x". The student had said she heard the "x" sound in the word "socks" and that was a confusing moment for everyone. I think with the next implementation of this lesson, we will really need to emphasize more that rhyme has to do with the sounds you hear not necessarily matching the letter combinations you see. After having explained this to our students on the fly during the game, prompting them to vocalize the words and listen for similar sounds, they caught on and were mostly successful at identifying rhyming pairs.
It stuck out to me that when students were asked to give examples of rhyme and then again asked to recall rhyme from the book, my first graders were readily able to do this but Ariana's second graders struggled to respond without additional supports. As we discussed it, we realized that they are very different demographics of students that could affect that way in which students respond to requests for information. Also I have learned that my particular students are often risk takers in the classroom who were maybe more willing to vocalize examples without fear of getting it wrong. Ariana's group (including ELL students) may not have been as self assured and therefore not given responses right away without review or checking in the book first.
I thought about where these students are in terms of their decoding skills. I realized through these lessons that most are just starting to enter Jeanne Chall's Stage 2 or Ehri's Consolidated Alphabetic Phase. " Readers at this stage have committed many sight words to memory and are able to begin seeing letter patterns that occur across words...Rather than relying on tediously sounding out each phoneme in each word, readers begin chunking groups of letters together and so are able to generalize as they read and spell" (Purcell-Gates, Jacobson, and Degener, 2004, p. 55). I believe rhyming activities like the ones Ariana and I did support this important step by providing letter combination patterns to practice generalizing from. I believe it would be helpful next time to focus on and identify specific chunks for students to learn and apply. I know I was not explicit enough in highlighting these "chunks" for students. The circling of them that I did on the whiteboard was not enough for students to understand why I was circling them and how that could help them with other words. I needed to use more examples with those same chunks and do more guided practice. The "practice of making the process explicit addresses Delpit’s (1995) concerns about the need for explicit teaching
of the codes of power, particularly with African American children. Discussions of how you find things out (reading and thinking strategies, the nature of texts,
the role of mistakes in learning, etc.)" (Goodman, p.439)
I thought about where these students are in terms of their decoding skills. I realized through these lessons that most are just starting to enter Jeanne Chall's Stage 2 or Ehri's Consolidated Alphabetic Phase. " Readers at this stage have committed many sight words to memory and are able to begin seeing letter patterns that occur across words...Rather than relying on tediously sounding out each phoneme in each word, readers begin chunking groups of letters together and so are able to generalize as they read and spell" (Purcell-Gates, Jacobson, and Degener, 2004, p. 55). I believe rhyming activities like the ones Ariana and I did support this important step by providing letter combination patterns to practice generalizing from. I believe it would be helpful next time to focus on and identify specific chunks for students to learn and apply. I know I was not explicit enough in highlighting these "chunks" for students. The circling of them that I did on the whiteboard was not enough for students to understand why I was circling them and how that could help them with other words. I needed to use more examples with those same chunks and do more guided practice. The "practice of making the process explicit addresses Delpit’s (1995) concerns about the need for explicit teaching
of the codes of power, particularly with African American children. Discussions of how you find things out (reading and thinking strategies, the nature of texts,
the role of mistakes in learning, etc.)" (Goodman, p.439)
Next Steps
Throughout this lesson it became clear that for my first grade students were able to grasp the concept of rhyme and very capable of recognizing it when provided auditory means. However, all of the students I worked with had moments of confusion, struggle and often needed to conference with each other when only written words were provided. Due to this observation, I believe it is still beneficial to continue to do lessons with a focus on identifying rhyme. However, the next lesson with a rhyming focus should also emphasize that rhyme is about similar sounds made with various letter combinations. Students should have additional auditory experiences of discerning rhyme while also looking at the written words.
After reviewing my lesson and referencing Reading to Live by Lorraine Wilson, I was also struck by the connections that could be made between rhyme and spelling. Those connections would lead to fruitful discussions. For example, Wilson suggest having students contribute words that are "spelled like try". "Note on the try list words like activity and assembly. A teacher list would most probably have been limited to try, by, cry, my, fly and why. Also having the children come up with the lists gives them a sense of ownership: what they know is valued in this classroom" (Wilson, p. 18). I realized that by limiting my students to only making lists based on rhyme or words recalled from the book, I was stifling their own connections to other familiar words that could have been examples in the instruction and may have missed opportunities for important discussion regarding spelling.
Student should also be able to work towards thinking critically about what rhyme is and isn't. This way we could get away from any confusion over words that may have some similar sounds but not be rhyming words. Something that I believe students would find incredibly engaging would be to have them analyze a pop song for its use of rhyme. We could discuss how many songwriters, rappers, and music artists use rhyme to give their song a catchy lyric or for the purpose of rhythm. We could also critically discuss how some songwriters might use words that almost rhyme but not quite.
I would provide students with a choice of which song they wanted to work on from a preselected group. It is important to note that I would use appropriate pop/hip hop songs and not nursery rhymes and typical "kid" songs. I believe this is an opportunity to incorporate and validate the culture of my students and their interests outside of school. I would need to provide them with access to an auditory clip of the song, a copy of the lyrics with the "words" that were attempted to rhyme highlighted, and an appropriate graphic organizer for recording their discoveries and thinking about whether or not the words used truly rhyme. They would be instructed to listen to the song while following along on the lyric sheet (using tracking fingers if possible). It would probably help for them to be able to pause after each line where a rhyme is attempted so they can discuss it and record whether they think "yes it is true rhyme" or "no it doesn't actually rhyme". If it is an example of "true rhyme" then they could identify and record what letter combinations are responsible for the rhyming sound in each word.
I believe that this would be a way to incorporate a different type of literacy into the classroom. In addition students would be expected to use higher level critical thinking skills to discuss and determine "true rhyme" and "forced rhyme". They could also start to think about the purpose of rhyme and whether or not it matters if things rhyme perfectly or not in things like songs and poetry.
See the following example that is inspired from something all my students at Stanton Elementary go crazy for:
After reviewing my lesson and referencing Reading to Live by Lorraine Wilson, I was also struck by the connections that could be made between rhyme and spelling. Those connections would lead to fruitful discussions. For example, Wilson suggest having students contribute words that are "spelled like try". "Note on the try list words like activity and assembly. A teacher list would most probably have been limited to try, by, cry, my, fly and why. Also having the children come up with the lists gives them a sense of ownership: what they know is valued in this classroom" (Wilson, p. 18). I realized that by limiting my students to only making lists based on rhyme or words recalled from the book, I was stifling their own connections to other familiar words that could have been examples in the instruction and may have missed opportunities for important discussion regarding spelling.
Student should also be able to work towards thinking critically about what rhyme is and isn't. This way we could get away from any confusion over words that may have some similar sounds but not be rhyming words. Something that I believe students would find incredibly engaging would be to have them analyze a pop song for its use of rhyme. We could discuss how many songwriters, rappers, and music artists use rhyme to give their song a catchy lyric or for the purpose of rhythm. We could also critically discuss how some songwriters might use words that almost rhyme but not quite.
I would provide students with a choice of which song they wanted to work on from a preselected group. It is important to note that I would use appropriate pop/hip hop songs and not nursery rhymes and typical "kid" songs. I believe this is an opportunity to incorporate and validate the culture of my students and their interests outside of school. I would need to provide them with access to an auditory clip of the song, a copy of the lyrics with the "words" that were attempted to rhyme highlighted, and an appropriate graphic organizer for recording their discoveries and thinking about whether or not the words used truly rhyme. They would be instructed to listen to the song while following along on the lyric sheet (using tracking fingers if possible). It would probably help for them to be able to pause after each line where a rhyme is attempted so they can discuss it and record whether they think "yes it is true rhyme" or "no it doesn't actually rhyme". If it is an example of "true rhyme" then they could identify and record what letter combinations are responsible for the rhyming sound in each word.
I believe that this would be a way to incorporate a different type of literacy into the classroom. In addition students would be expected to use higher level critical thinking skills to discuss and determine "true rhyme" and "forced rhyme". They could also start to think about the purpose of rhyme and whether or not it matters if things rhyme perfectly or not in things like songs and poetry.
See the following example that is inspired from something all my students at Stanton Elementary go crazy for: