Parts of a Tree, Kindergarten Lesson

Readworks.org is a website that I've come to rely on for useful passages and lessons aligned with the common core. If you've never been there, please check it out. It's really worth it to sign up and it's FREE!! You'll find comprehension units, novel units, skills/strategies lessons and lots of reading passages all organized by grade level, lexile and skills. You can even create your own binder to store any lessons you want to keep for future use. Have I mentioned that I absolutely LOVE this site!!

Here's one lesson I used from ReadWorks that follows the Close Reading strategy. My Kindergarten students and I were reading the "Parts of a Tree" passage. This is a one page passage about four different parts of a tree: leaves, bark, branch and roots. It's a very simple story but I was amazed at how my students had no idea about the names of these parts. Most of my students are high level ESL so this really surprised me. The only part they had background knowledge about was leaves.

During the first reading, I read aloud the whole passage and emphasized the vocabulary words with my voice. We then had a short discussion about trees and what they see happening to them during this time of year. During the second reading, I stopped reading to talk about the four parts. After reading the passage, I drew a picture of a tree with the four parts and we talked some more about their function. To make sure the students were clear about the parts (I'm not the best artist!), I also found pictures online with the parts labeled. Now the students had two pictures to help them understand the vocabulary terms.

After the third reading the students answered questions from a worksheet that was generated by ReadWorks. Since these are kindergartners in the first semester of school, most questions have pictures as answers but some of the questions asked students to read words, write answers and draw pictures. Here's an example of one page of the assessment students completed:

I read aloud the questions to the students and then they circled their answer choice. I was surprised at the details students included in their drawings. Reading closely really helped the students understand this lesson and I think they will retain the knowledge learned for a long time!