The GPS of Literacy: A Balanced Literacy Lesson Plan
LaKessa Cooks
Walden University

Instructor: Dr. Jann James 6705R7/READ 67050-7 Reading and Literacy Today November 16, 2014

The GPS of Literacy: A Balanced Literacy Lesson Plan

A balanced approach to literacy provides the best opportunity to develop the reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking skills necessary for academic success and personal satisfaction (Newton Public Schools, 2014). My lesson consists of sixth grade ELA content. This lesson was implemented for my homeroom sixth grade resource class. In this class I have a total of five students with specific learning disabilities. Their developmental levels are emergent and developing readers. The topic of my lesson is Elements of Plot. The lesson duration is 45 minutes. The state standard, which comes from the Common Core State Standard that is used for this lesson, is RL.6.3: describe how a particular story's or drama's plot unfolds in a series of episodes as well as how the characters respond or change as the plot moves toward a resolution. (Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2010). My learning objectives are: students will be able to analyze complex text and identify the exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution in a story.
Prior to the lesson, I held a discussion with my small group on what they knew about plot, and I gave the students a pre-assessment on the elements of the plot. This helped to trigger their prior knowledge and it helped me to identify what they had already knew about the elements of plot. My students watch and listened to the book Enemy Pie, which was read by actress Camryn Manheim on our classroom promethean board. Shanahan (2006) states, technology can be a useful support with fluency because students can engage in reading-while-listening activities, in which they practice reading along with a tape-recorded text. This allows students to listen to models of oral reading and to record their own performances. I chose this story because it has a simple and predictable plot. Since my students have specific learning disabilities this story was at their level of ability. This story came me from a website called www.storylineonline.com, and it has famous people actually reading children’s books with excellent expression. My lesson went through the process of finding the elements of plot which are: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. I knew that the climax is the most challenging part for students to locate. I spent extra time explaining and giving examples of the climax. I asked essential questions to trigger the brains of my students and get their creative thinking juices flowing.
After teaching the lesson, I reflected on what I thought was successful and what could be changed for a future lesson. I discovered that I was able to effectively teach the elements of plot and helping students to identify each. With the pre-assessment discussion, students were able to take advantage of what they knew from past experiences and applied it to the pre-assessment. Activating and building on a student’s prior knowledge is essential (Reutzel & Cooter, 2015). In regard to the assessments I chose for this lesson, I was able to see that they were effective. The plot diagrams that were completed by the students, their class participation in the discussion, and the answers to the questions that gave indicated that they were genuinely attentive in the lesson. Thinking in terms of what I could have done differently, I felt that I could have introduced difficult vocabulary and word recognition because they are imperative literary elements that will come in handy throughout their years in school.
In conclusion, I felt that my lesson on elements of plot was a great interactive learning experience for my students. According to Newton Public Schools (2014),