On day three we read the story of Juan Verdades. I provided a graphic organizer for the students to describe and record the setting, characters and the characters’ actions. As a class we read the story and filled in the organizer. I took answers from the class as how to describe the setting, who were/are the main characters in the story and what do they hope to gain or protect? We also made general predictions on the story’s’ outcome after each portion of the story was read aloud. From these summarizations and descriptions of the events, the students were then able to determine the theme of a text. I hadn’t considered the EdTPA when designing my lesson and perhaps that is my own folly. I had set out to instruct how we, the readers, use the things given to us; the setting, characters, and characters motivations or plot events to discover a possible theme the author wishes us to consider. We completed three phases of the graphic organizer together, and I had requested the students read along with me and complete the last phase, including the prediction, by themselves. There were many students who had little trouble describing the events and yet there were a few who had some difficulty describing what was happening in the story in their own words. It is these few students who had difficulty making a connection to the story and consequently did poorly on the comprehension quiz. …show more content…
I am torn between knowing if the few students who did poorly on the comprehension quiz had difficulty in describing the events in their own words or if the students were unable to make a meaningful connection to their own lives and therefore the students did not apply