Miller, Karly Lessons

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Karly Miller Karly Miller Home Learn More Standards Inspiration About the Author

In a time where many students are struggling to meet the rigorous expectations of the CASS (California State Standards) and what it means to be Career and College ready in the 21st century, we as teachers need to locate the best resources and strategies to support ALL students. This page will provide you with lessons to support focused language instruction while leveraging the feedback of various comprehension tools.

Language Support

Start at the Very Beginning:
Setting Up Effective
Partner Share

Before you can have students participate in productive discussion around text, we need to have routines in place. This lesson highlights where to begin in setting up partner discussion, which can eventually lead to peer feedback and support in accessing complex text.

K-6 Language Resources-LAUSD

LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District) has created a great resource for Conversation Practices which is structured as: Setting the foundation, Create and Clarify, Fortify, Negotiate, and Present. These build student's knowledge of constructive conversation skills.

Another resource from LAUSD, which builds on the Conversation Practices, are Unit Resources which provide 25 lessons with content to support those lessons. Another fantastic resource.

The Follow-Up:
Language Supports For
Partner Discussion

There are a TON of sentence stems and frames out there to support students in having productive collaborative conversations around text. I spent the better half of this program researching and vetting a lot of different ones with a group of 2nd grade students. One of the best resources I utilized was the work of Jeff Zweirs. He works with the Understanding Language Project out of Stanford University. The big caveat here is this is largely focused at 2nd grade and up. This lesson highlights the work of Jeff Zweirs.
Skill and Discussions Prompts

Constructive Conversation Skills Poster (PDF)
This tool shows four important conversation skills, their icons, and sentence starters to help students engage in purposeful and extended interactions.

Conversation Observation & Analysis Tool
This assessment tool helps users to observe conversations and take notes on what teachers are doing and can do, what students are doing and can do, and next steps.

Agree/Disagree Sentence Cards

Reading Comprehension

Start at the Very Beginning:
Five Finger Retell

Student's need a way to be able to retell a story in a simple way.
In my initial action research I utilized the Five Finger Retell as a tool to support students in comprehending and retelling literature and informational text.

Five Finger Retell Lesson
This lesson outlines how you can use the Five Finger Retell as a tool for simple comprehension and retelling of a text, either with a peer or teacher.

Five Finger Retell Bookmark
This is a bookmark that I used with students for them to recall the 5 fingers. Students can reference this, and they are made into an easy to print (5) on a sheet.

Bringing in Technology:
Rewordify &
Reading Comprehension

This is the MEAT of what I explored with my second round of action research. First, this tool is such a fantastic resource to provide student's with additional feedback about where they "get stuck" when comprehending a complex text. Second, I have included a series of lessons that detail out how you would incorporate this tool into your regular reading comprehension and/or close reading lessons.