Brittney Sawyer

Competency C: Developmentally Appropriate Instruction

Regent University
10/23/13

Rationale
When teaching elementary school students it is critical that the instruction
methods be developmentally appropriate for them. This is something I always took into
consideration when planning my lessons for my first placement fourth grade inclusion
class. One subject that I was responsible for teaching while I was with this class was
shared reading. During this period each day, I would read a story out-loud from the
students' reading textbook and the students would follow along in their own books. To
prepare for this I would read the stories the day before to determine where would be good
prediction/stopping points, what words or terms the students might not know, and what
questions to ask to get them to think critically. The main topics I tried to teach them
through the shared reading were making predictions, determining theme, and author's
purpose based on evidence from the text. To help with this I would always give the
students a graphic organizer where they would write down the characters, setting,
author's purpose, and two attempts to figure out the theme of the story. For the first theme
slot, they would fill this out when we were half-way through using the text we had
already read to predict what the theme was. The students would fill out the correct theme
in the second slot after we had finished the story. Using this organizer helped the students
to not only understand theme and author's purpose, but how to find evidence to support
these in the story.

Name:_____________________________
Characters:_____________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________

Setting:_________________________________________________________________
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Author's Purpose: _______________________________________________________

Support:________________________________________________________________
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Theme:_________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
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Support:________________________________________________________________
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Theme:_________________________________________________________________
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Support:________________________________________________________________
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