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Teach decoding, fluency and comprehension with "The Shop," Unit 6 of At the River 

Welcome to At the River News
September / October 2017

 
Happy Fall!

I hope your classes are off to a good start. The leaves are beautiful in North Carolina right now.  

This month, I'll share ideas for helping students increase decoding skills, fluency and comprehension using "The Shop" from Unit 6 of At the River. For many of my non- and semi-literate adult students, this story marked a turning point where they could read more confidently and independently than before. You'll find activities that pre-teach vocabulary, build phonemic awareness and phonics skills, increase reading fluency, promote word recognition, and help students demonstrate comprehension. You can apply these activities to other stories in At the River as well. 

Many of the strategies shared are also on short video clips which were homemade in my beginning literacy classroom - with real students! So, you'll see other real classroom stuff in the videos like phones ringing, awkward moments, and real classroom clutter. This group included speakers of Arabic, Swahili, and Spanish who had 0-6 years of formal education in their L1. Special thanks to my student volunteers! Many thanks to my colleagues Dorothy McKelvie, Susan Ballard, Kathy Ahlers, Anne Tekmen, Janine Maldonado, and Kathie Baggott for filming, appearing in the videos, and reviewing them for me. 

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Your comments and questions are always welcome.  

Shelley Hale Lee
Author, At the River and Other Stories for Adult Emergent Readers
attheriver@emergentreaders.org
www.emergentreaders.org
http://wayzgoosepress.com/shl.html
Lesson: Shopping for clothing with "The Shop", Unit 6 of At the River                                                         
Goal
Students will be able to read "The Shop" fluently and accurately, and will be able to demonstrate comprehension of the story. 

Prior Knowledge
By Unit 6, students have learned explicitly many of the single consonants and digraph "sh", as well as short vowels a, i and o. Students are ready to handle a longer story with more complex sentences, and are ready to connect the reading practice in At the River to the topic of clothing and shopping. It's ideal to use "The Shop" while you're teaching a larger shopping unit using a picture dictionary or your favorite core text. 
 
Materials needed
Flash cards for short a, i and o; flash cards for all single consonants taught in Units 1-6 plus digraph "sh"
         *Cards seen in the videos are from PhonicsQ
Magnets/tape
Markers and board
Pictures of key words from Unit 9: Pam, Bob, van, shop, hat, shirt, cap, pants, lot, sit, sad, glad
Word cards for the pictures
At the River, p. 66-67
          *Note: the reproducible version is used in the videos
Use visuals before introducing words in print
 
Put pictures of key words in the story up on the board. Number them 1-10. Say a word and ask students to identify the picture by its number. Continue in random order. This shows you whether they understand the spoken word before showing the written word.
Clip 1: Connect spoken word with visuals 
 
Connect sounds to the visual and to the whole word
 
In these clips, you'll see scaffolding that takes students from phonemic awareness to recognizing and reading the printed word. Visuals are key for ESL students. Phonemic awareness is working with sounds only, apart from letters. Phonics is putting the sound and letter (phoneme and grapheme) together. 

Clip 2: Building words. Students supply the sounds while the teacher writes the word. Building words

Clip 3: Blending. The teacher supplies the sounds; students blend them into a word and identify the word. Blending

Clip 4: Word recognition. Students match the written word with the visual. Match word to picture / comprehension check
Build reading fluency with scaffolded reading
 
Now that students have practiced recognizing individual sounds and blending them into decodable words, they can work on reading decodable words along with common sight words in full sentences. Notice that students are moving away from the visuals to focus on the print, and they are moving from single words to whole sentences. For a fuller description of the scaffolded reading process, download the handout found here. 

Clip 5: The teacher reads while students listen and track with print. Then, students echo the teacher. Scaffolded reading first steps

Clip 6: Students practice scanning the text by identifying what number sentence the teacher is reading. Then, students practice phonics skills by calling out words that begin with a sound provided by the teacher. Scaffolded reading midway point

Continue with the other steps of the scaffolded reading process which includes pair reading and individual reading for the teacher. 
Word recognition activities that lead to comprehension
 
Now that students are comfortable reading the text fluently and independently, move into these activities which promote quick word recognition skills and move toward comprehension activities. 
 
Clip 7: Students circle words and phrases that the teacher calls out. Students use phonics and scanning skills to identify the words. This is an easy activity that builds fluency and quick recognition of sight words. It's also a good warm up and review of the story if you need to work on it for multiple days. Thanks to my colleagues Susan and Kathy for appearing in this video. Circle the word or phrase

Clip 8: Word recognition and comprehension. Students focus on the whole text. The teacher reads sentence #1, replacing a key word with another word. Students listen and say yes if the teacher reads the sentence correctly, or no if he/she reads it with a mistake. Continue with all sentences. Check comprehension and word recognition
 
Demonstrating comprehension
 
The yes/no activity in the last clip leads to comprehension activities such as CCQs and questions with the 5 Ws.

CCQs (comprehension check questions): With books open or closed, students listen and say yes or no to the teacher's statements about the story. For example: Bob and Pam have a car. (no) Bob and Pam have a van. (yes). The van can go to the school. (no). The van can go to the shop. (yes). The shop has a lot of hats and shirts. (yes). The shop has a lot of caps and shoes. (no). Continue with statements about the rest of the story. 

Now, ask questions with the 5 Ws: who, what, where, when, why.
Ask questions orally first, eliciting answers. For example: Who has a van? Who goes to the shop? Where do Bob and Pam go? What does the shop have? Who likes the shop? Where does Bob sit? Why is Bob sad? Then give students the questions on paper to answer in complete sentences based on the story.  
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