The Artifact that I chose to represent Standard Six: Reading, Writing, and Oral

Communication, is a small reading group project I designed for my student teaching in

the class CI 466. This project contains four detailed lesson plans created for a group of
students during literacy group. The time is a specific time during the day called Bees
time, in which the students leave and work with other students in the grade at the similar
reading level. The group that I was working with was the students at the lowest reading
level. At the end of the artifact, I reflected on the process of creating these small group
lessons, and how I could change and make improvements for my future teaching. This
artifact demonstrates my ability to integrate various instructional approaches that develop
a variety of different reading, writing, and oral communication skills. I also demonstrate
my ability to model, explain, practice, and provide feedback to students in order to
monitor their growth and independent learning.
This artifact is an appropriate representation of Knowledge Indicator A because it
has helped me understand appropriate and varied instructional approaches to be used
before, during, and after reading, including those that develop word knowledge,
vocabulary, comprehension, fluency, and strategy use in the content areas. Each lesson
contains different strategies for guided reading. In all of the lesson plans the teacher
guides the students in the reading strategy of making predictions. There are vocabulary
words attached to each of their stories, and after reviewing their meaning and background
knowledge the students are asked to predict what they think the story will be about. By
prompting students before reading the book to explain what they think is going to
happen, engages the students thinking and activates their brains to use past knowledge
and thinking. This ia an example of how I am able to instruct students and guide them
towards learning about different reading strategies. At the end of each lesson, the students
are prompted in different ways to think about what they just read, or heard. The students
also interact in through retelling their favorite parts of the story. This is an example of
anther reading strategy. Retelling is beneficial for developing students to understand ad
make sense of the words in front of them. This artifact is a great example of my ability to
use a variety of strategies in order to create a successful guided reading activity.
This artifact is also a great representation of Performance Indicator E. I have
demonstrated my ability to use modeling, explanation, practice, and feedback to teach
students to monitor and apply comprehension strategies independently, appropriate to the
content learning.

I attempted to use visualization strategies in all of the lessons in an attempt to
cater all the needs of my struggling students. In lesson #2, for example, the students use
visualization strategies in order to help understand the progression of the story
(beginning, middle, and end) as well as to visually see the most interesting facts of the
story. Throughout all the lessons, the teacher guides the students in visualization through
using directive statements. Everyone turn to your reading and put your finger on the first
word in the story. Someone tell me how I should start. I will begin by reading the story to
you. I want you all to follow along with me word by word. This was directly taken from
my lesson planning, and demonstrates that I plan for, and implement strategies such as
modeling, explanation, and practice in order to teach students to apply comprehension
strategies, such as visualization, on their own.
My growth and development as a teacher is demonstrated with through the
creation of this artifact, because I was able to create and implement lesson plans, and
appreciate how using the different strategies helps the student reach their goals. My small
reading group lesson project helped me understand how to implement teach to a targeted
reading level and break things down to a basic level of comprehension. This teaching will
help me in my future teaching because I will have had practice in creating interactive
lesson plans and will be able to bring forth this idea of working with the small groups
based on reading level. I hope to bring the idea of bees time to other schools I work at
because it seems to be creating a lot of success for the students.