How to Create SOR-Aligned Lesson Plans for 3rd & 4th Grade Using Your Students Favorite Books
You may have heard that 3rd grade is the year where students transition from learning to read to reading to learn. But how exactly do we support that transition for students who are still working on the foundations?
Today, we’re sharing about how you can use your students’ favorite books to create evidence-based lesson plans that align with the Science of Reading so that your 3rd and 4th graders can begin to generalize those foundational skills to higher-level reading.
This process requires 5 steps:
Step 1: Outline the Skills
Some of the key skills we want to make sure to address include those outlined in the National Reading Panel Report that was published in 2000. Those skills include phonological awareness, phonics, vocabulary, reading fluency, and comprehension. We also want to include instruction in writing as reading and writing are reciprocal processes (basically like the heads and tails of a coin).
Once you have the skills you need to target outlined, you can begin putting them into a progression.
Step 2: Build a Skill Progression
The skill progression is also known as a scope & sequence. You want to make sure that your skills are building in a logical progression! This is where systematic and cumulative instruction comes in!
We use these stairsteps to visualize how subskills in each core literacy component build upon each other. For example, in a phonics progression, you might be working from consonants and short vowels all the way through stable final syllables. The great thing about students in 3rd and 4th grade is that you can often jump straight into closed syllables because you will still have an opportunity to target consonants and short vowels, blends, and digraphs, within closed syllable instruction. Basically, you are using your students’ needs and abilities to determine where you need to begin within your skill progression.
Which brings us to our next step!
Step 3: Consider Students’ Needs
This will help you understand how much time you should focus on each area.
Even though we need to be hitting on phonological awareness, phonics, vocab, fluency, and comprehension, that doesn’t mean we need to spend equal amounts of time on each of those areas.
Consider - what are the specific goals for your students? Do they need extra work in word recognition to support decoding? Do they need more support in vocabulary or comprehension? We like to use a simple grid to help “group” students in order to understand their needs.
Now this doesn’t mean that all of these students need to belong in one group, what it means is that you can understand where each “group” of students will need the most targeted support.
Step 4: Timing
When we put our lessons together, we like to break our chapter books up into sections or individual lessons that create units. These will match the amount of time that we have with our students.
For example, in our book clubs, we work with students once per week for 10 weeks. So we break our book and each of the skills we want to target into ten parts. For example, in our Wild Robot unit, we typically covered one chapter per week but because there were 14 chapters in the book, we needed to combine some of the chapters together.
Step 5: Pull Your Resources Together
We use a structure/template when building the lesson materials so that we can follow the same framework for all of our lessons. Within that framework, we’ll make sure that our content changes to align with the book we are using. This lets us build effective, evidence-based lessons but we don’t have to reinvent the wheel every single time.
If we already know what an effective closed-syllable lesson should look like, we can use those same skills and strategies in our next lesson. We will just want to make sure that we are pulling in specific words from our next book.
Putting it all together -
You can grab our Lesson Planning Guides here to help you plan out your own SOR-aligned Authentic Literature Units!
If you want to grab our 3rd-4th Authentic Literature Connections - you can find them all (Lemonade War, The Wild Robot, Upside Down Magic, and more) in our 5-Core Components of Literacy Activity Library here!