Andrea Emmons

Teacher, Gr. 1

Word/Sentence Making Journal

12/19/01

The Cat in the Hat is one of those stories which has universal appeal. Beginning and fluent readers alike delight at the tale with its humorous story line and rhythmic verse. There is a broad spectrum of reading abilities in my classroom, but despite this The Cat in the Hat is an absolute favorite. Many of the words are accessible to new readers, and the predictability of the rhyme pattern helps many students to decode unfamiliar words. The fun in the verse, as well as the use of dialogue in the text engages the fluent readers as they seek to read with expression. The delight with which my students reach for this book made it ideal for a sentence making activity. The children's familiarity with the book ensured that the human lens would be a strong aspect of the lesson.

I wanted the students to practice using the context of a story as a means of decoding and determining words. On index cards I wrote words found throughout the story. Then I printed portions of the story on flip chart paper, leaving out the words I had printed on the index cards. I varied the words I chose to omit. Some belonged to specific word families we have studied, others were less familiar and required use of context clues to figure out in which part of the sentence they belonged. I hung the pages of the flip chart text up on the board for every one to see. I told them I wanted us to do a shared reading, but there was a problem. I accidentally left out some words so the story didn't make sense. This made the activity meaning centered. We couldn't read the story until we filled the holes! Students worked with partners to read the words on the index cards dealt to them, giving the activity a social emphasis, which also brought in the human lens again as everyone was able to read their words when they worked with their partner. The activity was obviously language based, including elements of discussion, and reading. Once the students had figured out their words, they immediately went to work reading the text to see if they could figure out where their words fit. This was prior to the shared reading.

We began reading the text as a whole class, stopping each time we got to a bright orange line which represented a missing word. I asked all the children to think of words that might logically fit in the blank. Often students determined the actual word from the text, based on the clues provided by the story and word patterns. However, just as often they made logical guesses which were not words from the text, but did make perfect sense when read as part of the story.

Any one could raise their hand to offer a suggestion as to what the missing word might be. Allowing everyone a chance to respond to each missing word, even if they were not the person holding the card, resulted in students maintaining focus because they were invested in the activity. We reread the sentences from the start of the page each time we filled in a blank. This provided helpful repetition for emergent readers, giving them time to go over the text again and again. Also we try always to point to the words during shared reading to build one to one correspondence between the spoken and printed word. Reading each line multiple times allowed us to add expression based on punctuation and give our reading a sense of rhythm. Upon completion we read the entire excerpt of the story from beginning to end smoothly and fluently.

I found conducting a whole class lesson on using context clues in this manner allowed for the integration of all four lenses, and I appreciated how this activity allowed for a wide range of readers to actively participate. Simpler words could be given to less confident readers, more complicated words could be given to those who were able to meet the challenge. It is an activity that could be done multiple times with a wide variety of texts, depending on your intended learning objective. I think what might present a challenge to me in future lessons is finding another text that appeals so strongly to the whole class, although in future lessons they may not need such a predictable rhyme scheme, and might be able to handle a larger number of unfamiliar words.