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.
