Context: I developed a two-day reading lesson using The Royal Bee by Frances and Ginger Park for a diverse group of second grade readers. This lesson provides an authentic experience using multiple reading comprehension strategies while listening to the story read aloud. I created materials for this lesson to help students interact with the text, record their thinking as I read the text aloud, and practice using the strategies of making predictions, visualizing, and inferring. Artifacts include the lesson plan I developed and three examples of student work demonstrating different comprehension levels of The Royal Bee.

Royal Bee Student Work 1

Royal Bee Student Work 2

Royal Bee Student Work 3

Instructional strategies that I used during this lesson include reading aloud the text so that all students could participate in the lesson, activating students’ background knowledge before reading to facilitate comprehension, scaffolding student work by providing specific prompts and questions to guide thinking, encouraging a variety of responses (including verbal, written, and artistic), partner sharing of ideas and responses, and using meaningful routines and materials (reader’s workshop, clipboards, graphic organizers) to support the learning and literacy development of all students.

The student work I collected following this lesson is an authentic performance assessment, and shows evidence of students’ comprehension and ability to think critically about a text. I used the information about individual students’ understanding to determine how well different students used specific comprehension strategies. From my analysis, I gleaned evidence that showed me how each student thought about the text and could make informed decisions about which strategies to re-teach and how to re-teach them so that students might understand more fully. In addition to the written performance assessment, I used students’ oral responses throughout the lesson to engage students who were less strong writers in responding to the text, monitor student comprehension before, during, and after reading, and assess how students used information from the text to support predictions and inferences.

Reflection: In The Royal Bee, a young boy named Song-ho begins eavesdropping outside the door of a school for the privileged class in Korea, and is invited by the headmaster to begin attending the school despite the rags he wears. Because of Song-ho’s courage and perseverance, he earns the opportunity to represent his school by competing in the annual Royal Bee at the governor’s palace. As I elicited students’ thinking before, during and after reading, the connections that my students drew to other subject areas and personal experiences were rich and varied. When I asked students to infer why sangmins such as Song-ho were not allowed to attend school, one student responded, “I’m inferring that Martin Luther King did not give his speech.” This student connected his new learning with a previous lesson I had taught on Martin Luther King, and concluded that this story must have taken place before Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Another student linked the story to the school theme of “Honor, Courage, and Commitment.” In response to the question, “What do Frances and Ginger Park want us to learn from Song-ho?” she wrote, “They want us to learn that you should keep trying and trying and that you should be honor[able] and committed and to have the courage and not to be scared or nervous for any tests.”

The rich responses and critical thinking I elicited from these second graders is evidence that students in the primary grades can engage in meaningful interactions with texts. Skilled readers use strategies such as predicting, visualizing, and inferring in the context of everyday literacy experiences. In fact, a report published by the National Reading Panel argues that “literature should be used in read-alouds to develop and expand students’ oral language, vocabulary, background, and prior knowledge. The listening experiences at these levels should serve as the basis for directly and systematically teaching critical comprehension strategies” (National Reading Panel, 2000).

I could have asked the most skilled readers in the class to read the story independently and complete the comprehension activity, or I could have read aloud the story without linking it to comprehension strategies at all. I could have had students who were emergent readers practice phonics-based activities while the rest of the class participated in the activity. However, I believe in making appropriate accommodations and modifications to make the literacy curriculum accessible and enable all students to learn what strong readers do. The examples of student work that I include demonstrate the ways in which students of all reading levels engaged with the text in meaningful ways and thought critically about its themes. All students need these experiences if schools are to be equitable learning communities that enable each child to experience academic success.

National Reading Panel. (2000). Teaching children to read: An evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction. Washington, DC: National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.