Explanation of Small Group Activity for ELED 3226

For the small group activity, I used four low performance reading
students who were all reading the same book in their book club. I used a
teachers office as our space to do this mini lesson. I wanted there to be no
distractions from the class and a quiet and safe place where we could talk
freely. This particular book is Blubber written by Judy Blume. With Blubber,
we focused on main idea. We all started reading a new chapter which was
chapter three. We started this strategy with a minilesson using context clues
to find the main idea. I started, by stating that we need to look for key
information in the text to allow us to figure out what the main idea is. I
started by reading a few pages of chapter three. While I was reading I would
stop at an important part in the text and ask myself How is this important to
the text? What did I just read? etc. I discussed the main idea of the text
by going back and references what I knew was important. The students then
took turns reading aloud as we followed along. They would stop themselves
and ask others what was important on that page and why. I would stop them
from time to time and ask questions such as What did we just read? What
were the main points? Why would the character do that? etc. This
prompted discussion about the main idea using the context clues that we
were reading. We continued this process until we finished the chapter and
had a discussion (book club style) on what the main ideas were in that
chapter and how we knew that. The students were spot on for the main idea

of the text and gave good descriptive answers using references from that
chapter we read together. Overall I believe this small group reading activity
to be very beneficial to my students. Even though they were low performing
compared to the class, they were able to give accurate and descriptive
answers.