Standard 6 - Reading, Writing, and Oral Communication – The competent teacher has foundational knowledge of reading, writing, and oral communication within the content area and recognizes and addresses student reading, writing, and oral communication needs to facilitate the acquisition of content knowledge.

Picture Book Unit: How to Catch a Star

This standard was met while creating a picture book unit titled: How to Catch a Star (a picture book by Oliver Jeffers). The theme of this unit is Goal Setting and Problem solving—crucial skills needed through-out academics and life. This picture book unit is meant to serve as a foundation for these skills.

During the creation of this picture book unit, I advanced my understanding and skills that pertain to teaching students literary skills. I developed three lesson plans and a five-day unit plan to guide my teaching practices and facilitate student learning.

The lessons in this unit consisted of:

• Shared Inquiry Discussion: To assess prior knowledge of the concepts in the learning segment, I planned to lead a share inquiry discussion with students about the theme topics. I learned that assessing students’ level of understanding prior to an activity is crucial in knowing how to set individual/classroom goals.
• Leveled Reading Activity: A short-leveled reading activity introduced similar literary content to that of the main picture book. The goal of this short assignment was to ensure students began to think about goals and see examples of problem-solving.
• Interactive Read Aloud: An interactive read aloud for the main book in this unit, allows for student involvement in the story—stopping at key points to emphasize important parts of the story and to ask students observations/answer questions. I expanded on my knowledge that students comprehend more accurately if they are active in the reading process.
• Verb Tense Vocabulary Lesson: The vocabulary lesson in this unit consists of ten past tense verb suffixes taken from the book. I found that these vocabulary terms were perfect examples of actions that can be used in the pursuit of reaching a goal, furthering the idea that it takes effort and problem-solving skills to reach a goal.
• Story Sequencing Activity: Sequencing the events that unfolded in the story help students to build on their own concepts of order of events. I learned that when students put sequencing into practice, they are better able to understand/retain the concept.
• Reading Goal Activity: The last activity is a reading goal activity. While scaffolding on student prior knowledge of the topics/practicing skills, I learned that students are better able to set their own goals and sequence ways to problem solve those goals.

This picture book activity has provided me with a lot of resources and activities to do with the future students of my classroom. This unit also promoted growth in the way in which I differentiate my teaching for students of various needs. Differentiated instruction is the most important goal in any academic discipline/level, this unit will benefit future students by providing guidelines to support struggling, emergent, and advanced readers—my future students.