My students just recently took a trip down to our learning commons to select a novel that they will read for the next month or so. With their novel, I like to do many activities that relate to reading such as comprehension, word study and fluency.
In the past, I have put a few questions on the board that students can connect to such as:
- Connect the part you just read in your novel to your own life. How was it similar or different?
- How does the part in your novel that you just read contribute to the overall storyline?
- Summarize what just happened in your novel
- Why does the author spend so much time describing certain parts of the text?
- Identify a time in today’s reading that you had to use imagery
- Why do you think the author selected the title for your story? Use evidence to support your answer
- How would your story be different if a specific character was changed in some way?
These questions I would have my students answer in their language book or sometimes orally in a small group.
However, since our annual plan and school focus is on small group instruction with a focus on decoding, I am incorporating the word study from the new language curriculum into my novel study this year. I will save the comprehension for when students have finished their novel.
This week, I worked with students in groups of six and had them read a specific section of their book to me. I told students that we would be focused on suffixes today. I had them guess what a suffix is which few knew. Then, I asked students to bring their whiteboards and to copy this chart on them:
| ed | ing | ly | s |
These are some of the most common suffixes I explained. Then, students were asked to find words in the page of their novel that they had just read and fill them in on the chart. Students found many words and were able to do this. However, when asked to underline the root word, many students find this part challenging as some words that they put under “s” were words that ended in yes but did not have a suffix (ex: yes, us, his). They then found out that the “s” was added to singular words. They did not have as much trouble with the other three prefixes.
Next lesson, we will try prefixes. Once again, this lesson and related concepts are from the resource from our reading specialist team that I will cite again here:
“Teaching phonics & word study in the intermediate grades” by Wiley Blevins.