April 19, 2006

Reading Mastery III Sample Lesson (Part 1)

Here's a link to Lesson 68 from Reading Mastery III.

The Lesson is from the Teacher's presentation book and includes the relevant pages from the students' textbook and workbook. This lesson would be covered in December of third grade for most students who began learning to read in first grade; however if the students went through the reading Mastery I/II fast Cycle, which covers two years of reading instruction in one year, this lesson would be covered in December of second grade. Most kids of above-average intelligence or better who received a typical pre-K language exposure are capable of passing the Fast Cycle course.

Lesson 68 is typical of the lessons in RMIII and is representative of what transpires in a typical direct instruction language class in 2nd or 3rd grade.

RMIII lessons are designed to be taught in three parts:
  1. Exercises 1-6 are taught directly by the teacher within a 35 minute time period.
  2. Exercise 7 is an independent workbook exercise that the students complete at their seats after the teacher directed portion. Students are given between 20-30 minutes to complete the exercises.
  3. Exercise 8 is the work check portion in which the teacher and students check the workbook exercises and the teacher provides corrections to students who made errors. The workcheck portion should take 8-10 minutes.
Additional time may be necessary after the lesson to firm-up students who made too many errors during the lesson. Students should be firm on all the material presented in the lesson by the end of the school day.

I'm going to analyze the lesson in detail later today, but wanted to make it available for anyone who is interested in taking a look. The link to part II will be here.

2 comments:

Catherine Johnson said...

Just looked at the lesson - it's great.

I've been reading PENROD out loud to Christopher, and the vocabulary level is unbelievable. It's GRE level. I'm having to stop two to three times per sentence either to explain a word to Christopher (age 11) or to make sure he knows what it means.

PENROD was published in 1914. I think it's an adult book, but I read it 3 times as a kid. Unfortunately, I don't remember how old I was. I don't think I was in high school, but I don't know.

Catherine Johnson said...

The vocabulary words on page 1 are impressive.