Adventures in Literacy Land: Understanding by Design

Showing posts with label Understanding by Design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Understanding by Design. Show all posts

Planning A Summer Literacy Intervention Program: The Comprehension Component



Hello Friends! Tara here from Looney's Literacy. I'm so excited to share my Summer Intervention Program: The Comprehension Component with you all today.



 In a nutshell,  I designed the comprehension part of my program in four simple steps. This program is based off of my study of Wiggins and McTighe's Understanding by Design.
I established what my big ideas & goals were. As an interventionist I have a limited number of children. (This type of planning could be adapted to a whole class by applying the same principles and not so focused on one child's needs.) So each child has their own plan. I'm going to run you through one child's comprehension plan for week one. My overall goals for this particular student is to read at a third grade level with appropriate accuracy and comprehension, have a basic understanding of the different types of texts and their purposes, and asking questions to help understand text.

With goals established,  I determined the  assessment plan. I used end of the year summative assessments to give me a starting point. This information gave me a grade level and helped me focus on the level of standards each student would be able to accomplish in  three weeks.

Each child's assessment plan is designed to fit their needs and is *formative in nature. It may be as simple as a running record. Of course, with assessment  comes data collection. This year I'm going to try The *CCPensieve. This is a tool used for conferring during daily five time.

(This particular tool is a separate cost then basic membership to the 2 sisters Daily CAFE  if you're interested.)

*There will be one beginning and end summative benchmark to show total growth. 


This is week one's plan. 
Time  to focus on the "essential questions".  This plan is geared towards a 4th grade student who is at a 2nd grade level. The essential questions I've chosen for this student are:
Why do authors write?, How does story structure effect understanding of the text?,  and What's the big idea?

Steps three and four depend upon each other. In step three,  I decided which performance tasks that I will use in a formative fashion to determine understanding. The additional activities in step four aid in the learning/teaching process.

I paired each "question" to some essential standards that helped to further refine the performance tasks to check for understanding. Which is step three. Determine the performance tasks.  After reading Madonna's Mr. Peabody's Apples in week one, one performance task will include making a list of character traits for two of the main characters and using Tagul to make some character trait word clouds. Another performance task will be a journal entry about spreading rumors.

The learning plan is the actions that lead to  your big idea & goals from step one.  The difference between your performance tasks and your learning plan is the performance tasks goal is to get formative information. The rest of the learning plan list is used to learn the desired skills to meet the ultimate goal.

Thanks for taking the time to check this out! If you're interested, I'm working on putting together the whole program for grades 1-4. For each grade level "the whole program" consists of: 3 components- Reading, Word Work, and Writing, In each component you will find weekly ideas for both individual and small group activities, general formative assessments, teacher weekly planner w/ tasks and to-do list included, and more! I will be doing a series on my blog, as well, that will walk you through each component for one grade level.  So keep in touch! 


*The CCPensieve & 2 Sisters CAFE is not an affiliate link.  I just really like this tool and this site is a great resources if you implement the Daily Five and CAFE

0