Small Group Activity:

Four students who are struggling readers will be pulled for the small group activity.
They need a little extra help identifying connections and activating their schema in
order to make the connections. A small group of students will be pulled during the
guided practice to go over the connections more closely. Teacher will read The
Lifecycle of an Oak Tree aloud. Students will be given the same Making Connections
worksheet as the rest of the class. Students will try their best to make at least 2
connections to the book while teacher is reading. As a group we will go over and fill
out the types of connections at the end.

the identification of the area/aspect of literacy you are choosing to develop/support and an
explanation of how you determined this need within the class you are teaching, including
references to curriculum, student performance, and classroom climate/environment

For the small group activity, I decided to support my whole group lesson on identifying text
connections within a non-fiction text. I read a non-fiction text about oak trees to a group of four
struggling readers in the class. The group of students who were chosen because they struggle with
reading and comprehension. My coordinating teacher chose these students for the small group
because of their performance on other related activities.

the materials required to implement this instruction, including student and teacher resources

For this lesson I used The Lifecycle of an Oak Tree childrens book. I read this book to the kids so
that everyone would have the same text to go off of, but students could use their own schema to
make their connections. I also used the same Making Connections worksheet to assess students.

the intended/hopeful outcomes of this intervention

The hopeful outcomes of the lesson was to help the students understand how to make text
connections. Being able to make connections to the text helps students comprehend the text. The
goal was to teach to kids some trigger questions and thinking stems to help them activate their
schema.

a reflection on the results (both successes and challenges) of the implementation of this
intervention and modification you would make for future implementations (to be completed after
clinical experience)

The successes were that all four students made at least 2 out of 3 connections ad met the objective.
They understood the types of connections to make in the story. A challenge was that 2 students did
not show that they made a personal connection in the text to self category. They just said I see
acorns. They did not show specify if they saw acorns in the book or if they were referring to seeing

acorns outside. Overall the students did well on this activity. I think using the same book helped
because we were able to talk about connections afterwards and everyone was on the same page.
Modifications I would make for next time include reiterating every type of text connections before the
read aloud again and giving students more examples of connections so that they understand the
thinking stems.