Comprehension Mini Lesson

Alexis Padgett

Objectives:

Students will show their understanding a book of animals by answering true/false questions
before reading the book. They will be able to show their understanding by correcting their
answers and giving the reasoning.

Number of Students:

This will be a whole group lesson with 20 students.

Sequence of Lesson:

1. I will start by stating what we will be doing together, concentrating on animals. I will
explain that we will be dividing the lesson into 3 parts. There will be a pre-reading
assessment, a reading activity, and post-reading assessment.
2. For the pre-reading assessment, I will hand out a worksheet with 6 statements. The
students will read through the statements and state whether they believe the statements to
be true or false. They will show their thoughts under the statements writing out the word
true or false.
3. Once all of the students have had the opportunity to state if they think the statements are
true or false I will introduce the book that we will be reading together, What do you do
when something wants to eat you? By Steve Jenkins.
4. While reading through the book, the students will be checking with their first answers.
Once they find the correct answers, they will correct their own answers are wrong.
5. If the statements are false, the students will be writing the correct answers. This will be
their writing component of the lessons.
6. Once the students have had the opportunity to go through all of their answers and writing
correction to the false answers, the reading activity will be complete.
7. Next, we will move on to the post-reading activity. Here I will ask the students to write a
few sentences as if they were one of the animals that were talked about in the book.
 Name: ____________________
Anticipation Guide
Instructions: Read all of the statements. Circle true or false based on what you believe the
answer to be. When the book is being read, write the correct answer in the blank below the
statement. Additionally, if the statement is false, write the correct statement.

1. All animals have defense tactics. (True or False)

2. The hog-nosed snake plays dead to escape predators. (True or False)

3. The basilisk lizard is called the Jesus Christ lizard. (True or False)

4. The flying fish can glide up to 200 feet. (True or False)

5. The hover flying stings its predators to escape. (True or False)

6. The blue-tongued skink sticks its tongue out at predators to escape. (True or False)

Writing: Write two sentences based on one of the animals talked about in the book. Act as if
you are that animal and what you would do in one day.

1.

2.
Alexis Padgett

Comprehension Minilesson

Comprehension is a huge part of the language arts block, within any given school day.

When teaching comprehension, it is important to have a pre-reading, during reading, and post-

reading activity. In doing so, the students will predict what they think will happen in the text,

then be an active reader/listener, and reflect on their reading and understanding what they read.

For my comprehension lesson plan, the students performed an activity before during and after to

show their understanding. We were able to accomplish this through the use of an anticipation

guide for the book, What Do You Do When Something Wants to Eat You by Steve Jenkins.

This lesson was planned as a whole group lesson with 19 students. When teaching

comprehension, it is important to include a pre-reading activity and for this lesson, specifically, it

was incorporated through an anticipation guide. Having this activity allowed the students to

predict different elements of an animal that would be talked about in the book. In doing so, the

students were able to predict and begin thinking about what the story was going to be about. We

completed the anticipation guide before reading the story. I read each statement out loud making

sure that all of the students knew what the statement said. When completing this section, the

students got a kick out of some of the different statements. Some talked to one another,

wondering what was going to happen. Overall, while in pre-reading activity, the students were

all questioning as they should during this section of the lesson. The second part to a

comprehension lesson, during, occurred while I read the book out loud. The students became

active listeners while I read the book. This is because they were listening with a purpose. While I

was reading through the book, the students were looking to see if the statements on their

anticipation guide were true or false. If the statements were false, they were to write why. While
I was reading, I made sure that I was reading the material slow enough so the students would be

able to look at the statements on the worksheet. Finally, for the post-reading activity, the students

were to write two sentences incorporating information they learned from the book as well as

information that they already knew. After we finished reading the story, we went over each

statement and check if it was true or false and the students would give the reason of why. After

discussing the book, they began their post-reading writing activity. The students were to pick one

animal that was mentioned in the book and act as if they spent a day as that animal. Being that

the students had this topic, they were able to pull what they already knew about the environment

the animals lived in and the defense tactic they learned from the story. When completing this part

of the lesson, I was able to see that some of the students really thought about what they were

writing and really engaged with the material. Other students struggled to come up with

sentences. Overall, the students were engaged with each aspect of the lesson, seemed to enjoy the

material, and were active listeners and participators.

There are a few things I would like to do differently if I was to do this lesson again. First,

while I was reading, I wish, when it was on a page that related to one of the statements, I would

not have stopped and gone over the statement. Rather, I would have liked to read through the

story fully without stopping. In doing so, the students would have had to look out for the answers

on their own. After the reading was complete, we could go through all of the statements together

and when finding the answer, I would flip back to the page that the statement was on and reread

the information. This would ensure that the student heard all of the information, just in case they

missed a few statements during the first reading. Another element to the lesson that I would do

differently would be the ending. I would like to end our time with the anticipation guide by

having the students sharing information they found to be the most interesting in the book. This
could allow the students to share and discuss with each other on the parts of the story that was

interesting to them.

Incorporating comprehension and writing into my future classroom is very important.

Comprehension and writing are so important not just for language arts but for all subjects

throughout a child’s schooling. In my future classroom, I would like comprehension and writing

towards the beginning to the language arts block. Within this instruction time, there are various

materials that can be used. These materials include some reading material such as books or

articles and activities/strategies specifically for before, during, and after reading. Some examples

of pre-reading strategies that will be included in the class are setting questions before reading,

anticipation guides, contrast charts, and K-W-L. Example of during reading strategies is a story

map, K-W-L, timeline, and Response log. And finally, examples of post-reading strategies

include a response paper, think-pair-share, answering the questions set before reading, Venn

diagrams, QAR, and plot organizers. When teaching this part of language arts, it is important for

teachers to explicitly teach the structure of a text and how to navigate the material. Some text

structures that will be included are descriptive, sequence, compare/contrast, and cause/effect.

When grouping the children during this activity, it is beneficial to use their reading groups based

on their instructional reading level. Students with similar instructional reading levels will be

grouped together. In doing so, there will be no students who are bored ahead of others or

struggling to keep up.

When teaching comprehension, it is important to remember there is a difference between

teaching students how to comprehend versus assessing students on if they can comprehend.