Reading About Chocolate
During this lesson, I read aloud to my students How Chocolate is Made. They were all excited about the book and eager for me to begin reading. This read aloud went well. For the most part, my students were engaged and curious to know how chocolate is made. There were a few moments when some of my students were talkative. They were talking about the book, but blurted out between pages. This was distracting both to me as the reader and to some of the other students as listeners.
After reading the book aloud, I had my student verbally retell the sequence of events, using the transition words/phrases "First", "Then", "Next", "After that", and "Finally". For of these transition words/phrases, students told me one sentence followed the sequence in the book. For this part, the majority of my students wanted to participate and share their ideas. One student skipped one of the steps in the sequence. When this happened, the other students blurted out to tell them that they had forgotten something. I told them that that was one of the parts of the sequence, but I thought there was something else that had happened first. The, another student shared the missing part of the sequence. As my students worked together to do the retelling, I modeled for them drawing a quick sketch of what was happening. I modeled this because I am going to have them do the same sketches for the next lesson. Then they are going to use these sketches to write sentences to make a summary of the book. My students enjoyed making fun of my terrible sketches on the Smartboard :)
For my students that had trouble with this retelling, I would like to look at the pictures they are going to draw in the next lesson to see how they are doing with their retelling skills. For the students that miss a part of the retelling, I would like to talk to them individually about the book's sequence to bridge that gap.
