Bayram Binbir

Math Teacher

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

Performance Project # 3

Scaffolding Students Comprehension of Texts (34 points)

Imagine that you are planning a lesson for one book (story) of your choice. You realize after
reading chapter 10 that you have to develop pre-reading, during reading, and after reading activi-
ties. For example, I chose Big Nate Out Loud to read in my third grade classroom. To gauge
comprehension, I decided on a pre-reading activity to motivate students (p. 287), a guided com-
prehension activity to be used during reading (p. 291), and a writing journal activity for an after
reading activity. (p. 295) For this project your assignment is:

1. Choose a book
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (https://americanliterature.com/author/ambrose-bierce/
short-story/an-occurrence-at-owl-creek-bridge)
2. Choose a pre-reading activity (p. 287-290)
As a pre-reading activity I would like to implement Pre-teaching Vocabulary and Concepts.
3. Choose a during reading activity (p. 290-293)
During reading I would like to use Supported Reading activity
4. Choose a post reading activity (p. 293-295)
As my post reading activity I would like to use Questioning
5. And discuss how you might implement them in your lesson.

Using reading activities will help my students to understand the text that they are reading. Stu-
dents usually need our help when they read something because they are new for reading and they
do not know how to read efficiently. Before we start reading I prefer to pre-teach some vocabu-
laries that they will be using in the text and pre-teach the concepts. Using flash cards or vocabu-
lary games will help students to have an idea about the new vocabularies and make them ready
for the text. When we start reading, I mean during the reading I will be supporting the reading.
By doing Supported Reading I will make sure that I am helping them to get their attention on
certain ideas as they read, helping them clarify what they do not understand and summarizing
what they are learning. I would also be using Questioning as my post reading activity. I will be
asking questions to students to make them think about and respond to the information and ideas
in the material they have read. This activity could increase thinking critically about the text that
they have read.
Teaching Comprehension Strategies (33 points)

Reciprocal teaching procedure has four distinct steps: Questioning, Clarifying, Summarizing,
and Predicting. In your own words describe these four steps and explain briefly how they might
look in your classroom.

Reciprocal reading is an instructional activity in which students become the teacher in a small
group reading sessions. It has four steps; questioning step, clarifying step, summarizing step,
predicting step. Below I am explaining each of them.

1. Describe the questioning step.

In this questioning step, teachers are reminding students to generate questions as they listen
and read. Students are monitoring and assessing their own comprehension of the text by asking
themselves questions. With questioning, students explore the text more deeply and understand
the meaning of the text very well.
2. Describe the clarifying step.
In clarifying step, when students listen and read teachers should be reminding them to ask
each other what words and phrases are unclear to them. Teachers basically could ask the follow-
ing questions to students;
-How do we pronounce that?
-What does that word mean to you?
- What did you mean by that word?

3. Describe the summarizing step.

In this step students summarize verbally and them share with their assigned small group or
record their summary and read it aloud to their group. In addition tho that each small group
could create a semantic map with major points of significance shared by each group member.
4. Describe the predicting step.
In this step teachers are asking from students to predict what do they think about the reading.
Additionally teachers also need to make them to think about what is going to happen by asking
questions.
5. How might this look in your setting?
I really like reciprocal teaching procedures. It is like a game that you are always paying attention.
When we give a chance to students to act as a teacher in their groups we most of the time see
learning. Students are paying attention and they are thinking critically because of the predicting
step. Teachers try to make sure to use all the ways to help students like clarifying step, questions
step. In my classes I always use questioning method, clarifying method and summarizing
method. I really notice the difference and see that they learn with these steps more.
Encouraging Independent Reading and Reader Response (33 points)

Write a page about the practices you (plan to) implement in your classroom to encourage in-
dependent reading (p. 352-368).

Independent reading is something that students are expected to do by themselves. It is not some-
thing that can happen immediately and without help. In independent reading teachers are playing
very important role. They are the ones who are introducing this type of reading to them. There-
fore teachers should know how to encourage the independent reading. They can start encourag-
ing it by talking about it, explaining the importance of it to students. Independent reading always
require some time to be spent. So teachers need to provide enough time with students to do inde-
pendent reading. It is also important that teachers are providing a rich array of reading material,
the incentive to read and a place to read. In my school we have a very huge library with full of
books. So teachers get to take their students to library to spend some time to get books and try to
make students to earn habit of visiting libraries. This is an awesome way to make students love
the books and become book lovers. Moreover in regular classes teachers should maintain the in-
dependent reading program. Once students get used to have independent reading program then it
will be very good for teachers because her or his students are on the way of being a real reader.
Lastly, it is highly suggested that teachers are encouraging out of school reading. Doing indepen-
dent reading in just schools will not be enough for students. They need to continue to do their
independent reading out of school as well. Teachers could call families to make sure that they do
independent reading at home, ask from families to take their children to public libraries to check
out some books.