Tell Me What You Think Greek

Assessing Motivation: When I wanted to find out what kind of topics Izzy would be interested in, I conducted the “Tell Me What You Like” assessment from Assessment for Reading Instruction by McKenna and Stahl (2015. Through this, I learned that Izzy is interested in animals, magic, jokes, camping, drawing/painting, horses, detectives, love, famous scientists, food, cooking, etc. Izzy’s variety of interests helps give me many options when choosing what kinds of books to use in my study. In using this information, Izzy will be more likely to feel motivated. To find out which settings Izzy likes to read in, I conducted the “Elementary Reading Attitude Survey”, by McKenna and Stahl (2015). I learned that Izzy does not like to read in loud settings as it makes it hard to focus. Additionally, she does not enjoy reading aloud to other people, as it makes her nervous. This information will be useful when working with Izzy as I now know that I should find quiet spaces for us to work in, and should only ask her to read aloud when we are not around many other students. This will help keep both Izzy’s motivation and confidence high. Planning the Lesson: For my motivation lesson, I used the topic of food/cooking. I decided to use this topic because Izzy expressed an interest in it, and I wanted to make sure to keep her motivated and focused. This decision was based on the idea proposed by McKenna and Stahl (2015) that one’s interests are a reliable way to maintain a positive attitude about reading. I knew that because Izzy is interested in food/cooking, reading books related to the topics would keep her engaged. The 6 Cs of motivation are an easy way to ensure that tasks are motivating (Turner & Paris, 1995). For my lesson, I focused on creating challenge and constructing meaning. Turner and Paris (1995) suggest that challenging tasks are more likely to help students learn new information and remain engaged. I used challenge in my lesson by using text and asking QAR questions that were challenging enough to keep Izzy’s attention and reorganize …show more content…
Izzy had a great imagination and could accurately answer each question asked. Additionally, I feel that I did a great job deciding on which book to use. This is because Izzy was engaged and ready to read the text. I feel that the only thing I did poorly was skip the “Before Reading” portion of my lesson, which I did unintentionally. Two things that I would change are adding in the questions that I improvised during the read aloud and avoid asking the questions that put us off task. There were moments that I came up with a question that I did not originally have in my lesson plan. For the most part, this was okay and I would add the questions to the lesson if used in the future. There were also a few questions that threw us off track. For example, “have you ever plugged your nose while eating a food you did not like?” While this question was related to the text, it ended up sending Izzy on a tangent about food that she did not like. In the future, I would make more of an effort to ask only questions about the text, and save personal questions that are related to the text for a time set aside either before or after conducting the read