S. is a confident 4th grader who enjoys and identifies with being a reader and a writer. She reads and writes at home for pleasure and she is supported by a family of readers. S. reads different genres including historical fiction and adventure. S. is fond of animals and her cats inspired the Fuzzball the talking cat story. She has been known to create books to give as gifts and last year she gave her Mom a book for Mother’s day. Her love of plays and acting contribute to her love of language.
The testing we have done to date, confirms that S. is a skilled reader. On 1/25, we did a running record while she read The Mouse and the Motorcycle (grade 4.4 on the AR scale). S. had 98% accuracy (based on 6 errors/300 words) and none of the errors affected meaning. In addition, the QRI testing on 2/1 showed that S. read 139 words/minute putting her at the 75 percentile for 4th graders. In that passage on Amelia Earhart, she scored in the instructional range based on 7/8 questions correct. She was also a 4 on the NAEP fluency rubric for qualitative measure of fluency and expression. In her retelling, I scored it as a partial retelling (3) based on the 7 phrases she included in the recap of the story.
Regarding a lesson, I would like to take a deeper look into a story with S. As Routman says “most students do not read deeply” and I have had glimmers that this might be true based on some superficial retellings. In addition to the Amelia Earhart piece, S. has given us another retelling of a fictional story (Mouse and the Motorcycle) that was event focused as opposed to character focused. I might base a lesson on character development and determine if S. can really connect with the characters and understanding why they behave as they do. I would focus on inference to uncover if S. can read between the lines to understand a character’s motivations. I have no information in this area.
My thought is to use Tovani’s double entry diary as an easy tool. I would have S. fold a piece of paper down the middle and make two columns. On the left would be specific quotes from the text with page numbers (alternatively it could be a summary of a section.) On the right would be where she would write I infer….. I would model how to do this out so that my teaching is explicit. We could then do one together before letting S. go back to her seat to do more on her own.
After our talk in class last week, I am really liking your idea of using a double entry journal to help her think about infering. She really does seem to need more practice in this area!
ReplyDeleteThe more I think about it, it seems that when she is retelling, she is trying to grab words that she remembers from the reading, but she doesn't seem to be "reading between the lines" for meaning at all. I am very curious about what we will find after we have a chance to do this lesson!
Inference is a difficult reading skill. That is my only concern. However, all of your data so far says that S is a strong reader for her grade level. I think that it would be worth trying to practice inference with S to deepen her comprehension and meaning of text.
ReplyDeleteI saw my MT teach inference this week. The great method he used was having the students read a short section of text and then independently write a question that arose from the text. Then, the student would infer what the answer to the question might be. For example, the article the kids read stated that oil reserves in the Arctic are becoming easier to access because some of the ice is melting. So, a question the students had was, "where are oil reserves?" and the answer was, "underground/under the ice".
This might be an option/modification for you to teach S, since it has to do with inferring about factual data rather than character, which is often subjective.
Making inferences is one of those comprehension skills each one of us continues to practice. Have you considered text selection? Some texts require deeper reading than others!
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