LESSON PLANS FOR KINDERGARTEN
Ready Reading
Recommended Kindergarten Lesson Plan
Teachers know that lesson plans must be adjusted for many factors: time of year, instructional time available, needs of students, and resources available, among other factors specific to the students and school environment. The following plan is one example of what has worked in my own classroom as well as classrooms of other teachers. It is intended as a starting point for your own lesson planning.
Day 1 Introduction of New Letter Sound
Auditory
Follow Ready Reading manual suggestions.
Introduce the song from the Letter Songs CD.
Use the Letters and Sounds sheet to think of words/pictures.
Visual
Refer to Ready Reading Letter Pictures or Letter Writing. Students can draw or paint pictures at a later time.
Kinesthetic/Tactile
Teach movement for the letter sound.
Do air writing.
Practice writing on Letters and Sounds or Letter Writing sheets, or plain writing paper.
Blending
Use the Ready Reading Spelling page or plain paper.
If blending more words for the lesson, use regular writing paper or plain paper folded into boxes. Students write words and draw their own pictures.
Reinforcement
When time allows, do the Reinforcement activity from the Ready Reading manual. Students can color and/or cut out the activity page and make the game to play in class or take home for homework.
Day 2 - Review and Reinforcement
Briefly review sounds already taught. It can be done either orally or in writing.
You can use the Letter Picture and song taught the previous day.
Use the Ready Reading Word/Picture Cards for individual or group work. Complete the Word Blending assessment sheet, individually or as a group.
Choose one of the Extended Activities from the Ready Reading manual. Other activities can be done as time allows.
Day 3 - Storybook
Either orally or in writing, review some of the words from the lesson, especially those that appear in the storybook.
Introduce the Ready Reading Storybook. Have students color or underline lesson words as they read the storybook silently.
As a group, read and discuss the story. Send it home to be read to parents.
Introduce the Storybook Comprehension and Noting Details comprehension sheets. In the beginning, use as an oral Guided Activity. As students become more proficient, let them do part or all of the activity independently.
The Expressive Language and additional Extended Activities from the Ready Reading manual can be done on any of the lesson days as time allows.
NOTE:
Although I used this pace in kindergarten to teach all 66 lessons, many teachers at that level prefer to stretch the activities to 4 or 5 days and cover only Set 1 lessons for the school year. When the word lists and storybooks get longer, it might be preferable to use at least 4 days per letter sound, depending on the proficiency of your students.
Lessons 27-30, consonant digraphs, may take an extra day or two for blending and reading practice. In a normal school year, at a 3-day lesson pace, kindergarten can finished guided instruction of lessons 1-30 by the end of December. Teachers who choose a 5-day lesson pace for their students can very easily complete 30 lessons by the end of the school year.
Pre-K classes generally use the 5-day pace and do Lessons 1-30 throughout the school year.
Test at frequent intervals and at the end of Lesson 26 to determine needs for grouping to increase competency with letter sounds or blending.
After the semester break, begin Lesson 31 with the whole class while reviewing Lessons 1-30, if needed, for a small group. Remember, each lesson reviews the one before it, and the slower learners are normally able to keep up with the directed instruction–some make such remarkable progress once the blending “clicks” that their achievement can catch up or even overtake a few of the students who may have had a head start at the beginning of the school year.
Specific Basal readers may be mandated for use at your school. Ready Reading students should not need most of the phonics lessons usually presented in beginning basal readers but, if they are required to be used, those can often be done as independent seat work or center work for review. The only specific word introduction that may be needed prior to reading stories in basal readers is for non-phonetic sight vocabulary. Faster readers often use context clues along with knowledge of phonics to independently decode those words during reading.