Instructional focus
Analysis of STAR data revealed that the students needed further support in building comprehension at the sentence and paragraph level, and their vocabulary also needed extending. Further gathering and analysis of data using PROBE identified the need for practice in making inferences, and how to use information in the text to work out the meaning of unknown words, so Denise planned a series of lessons using a rich explanatory text. The instructional objective was to learn about the language choices the author made to craft his explanation, and to support students in making inferences from the rich descriptive language used by the author. This focus provided opportunities for students to infer and justify their inferences by finding evidence in the text.
The text was chosen because it linked to the class science topic (electricity) and supported students' learning needs in science as well as literacy. The shared reading approach was used to provide the necessary level of support and ensure that all students in the class could access the content of the text, including technical vocabulary, and participate in the discussion.
Through planned links to their writing of explanations, Denise also wanted to explore how the author went about writing the explanation. In particular, she wanted to explore the introduction and how the author used rich literary language in order to engage the reader. This was a direct link to what the children were doing in their own writing of explanations, namely, to use rich descriptive language that will have an impact on the audience.
The shared learning intentions were:
Expert comments and transcript
Watch the video and think about these questions:
Deliberate acts of teaching: modelling
Engaging learners with texts
Published on: 22 Mar 2016
