While driving to school this morning, I started thinking about data. We think our data points accurately describe a child's reading, or at very least, in, say, fluency, but then we group these children into small groups and their reading varies quite widely. I have to say I'm not sure I'm doing what I should be doing with this small group. We've been reading interesting true stories, high-interest, low-vocabulary as they're called, and then I ask comprehension questions. I had a good time looking up some background geography and showing the students where our latest story occurred (on a mountain in Maine). It was neat to see them make the connection and see what the mountain actually looks like. When the story mentioned the boy walked 90 miles, we talked about how far that would be from the school.
So here are four readers, and supposedly I'm in charge of teaching them to read better. Will reading stories round-robin really help them, in reading fluency or otherwise? Perhaps. I always say that just reading on the child's level will be helpful. Will answering questions about the story help with comprehension? Maybe I need to get them to ask the questions. We did try some summarizing, which I think is a nice start.
Of course I realize the types of ability-grouping we're doing is really looked down upon by many education professionals. However, I think we're coming to terms with some kind of agreement that it may be necessary for readers who are way behind.
No comments:
Post a Comment