Using Dingoes at Dinnertime in a SOR-Aligned Lesson
Have your students ever struggled to apply explicitly taught strategies to reading chapter books?
Have you ever struggled to keep your students motivated and engaged in your literacy instruction?
If so you are not alone!
One of the best strategies to help your students apply strategies while keeping them motivated and engaged is to build a structured and systematic SOR-aligned lesson and pair it with a chapter book.
But what exactly does that process look like?
Let’s take a look at one of our favorites from the Magic Tree House -
Dingoes at Dinnertime
When building this unit, we broke the book into 10 lessons (one for each chapter). In each lesson, we provide explicit instruction and extra practice in each of the 5 core components of literacy and writing.
Phonological Awareness
We like to start with a 10-part PA drill. This helps activate the phonology processor and helps prime the students’ brains for reading and writing tasks. We have students practice blending sounds and syllables, segmenting sounds and syllables, and manipulating sounds within words.
To create our phonological awareness prompts, we pulled words from the text so that the phonological awareness activities fit cohesively into our lesson. Added bonus - students get practice blending and segmenting words they will encounter in the chapter they read during that lesson.
Reading Fluency
In each of our lessons, we have students practice fluency at the word and sentence level.
Word-Level Fluency
For our word-level fluency tasks, we pull words from the chapter and then have students read as many as they can in 60 seconds. This allows us to track Words Per Minute and Correct Words Per Minute in each lesson. We can also provide error correction as needed.
Sentence Phrasing
For our sentence-level fluency tasks, we take a few sentences from the text and have students find the subject/predicate/adverbial phrase. Then, they can practice reading that sentence with proper phrasing and expression.
Explicit Phonics Instruciton
In each Book Club lesson, we explicitly teach and review phonics concepts like digraphs, closed syllables, etc. We have students practice decoding at the word level and then have them look for words with those patterns in the text itself to help promote generalization.
Spelling & Sentence Writing
To target spelling and writing, we pull words from the text to use as spelling words. We incorporate PA here by having them mark how many sounds they hear in the word.
We also have students come up with sentences by identifying a subject (who/what), predicate (did what), and adverbial phrase (why/when/where/how).
Vocabulary
In each lesson, we choose words for students to practice defining from the chapter. For example, for one of our Dingoes at Dinnertime lessons, students define the word “lucky.” They’ll read the sentence from the text that includes the word and then fill out the 4-part Vocabulary Framework. This framework asks them to identify a word’s category, function, synonym, and antonym to provide a full definition.
In each of the lessons, we also explicitly teach a new vocabulary concept. For example, in one of the lessons we teach categories. In another, we teach parts of speech, and we keep working from there.
These activities tie to the book as much as possible to help students generalize their vocabulary skills.
Comprehension
In each lesson in our Book Club units, we explicitly instruct a comprehension skill like direct recall, sequencing, identifying the main idea and key details, and so forth.
Then, students apply these skills directly to the authentic text they are reading.
Putting it all together:
Essentially the goal is to create a scope and sequence of skills and then explicitly target each of those skills across the course of the chapter book (in this case, the 10 chapters!).
Check out this video where we will walk you through the process step-by-step.
And, if you want to grab the Dingoes at Dinnertime Unit along with hundreds of other activities to use in your next literacy lesson, join us in our 5-Core Components of Literacy Activity Library where you can find this unit and tons of other favorites.