I have learned a lot about my buddy, A. over the past few weeks. On the examiner word lists, A. scored in the independent and instructional range up through high school. She is often reading books that above her grade level, such as Little House on the Prairie or Harry Potter. While she is very fluent and scored above the 75th percentile on the 4th grade fluency test, we found that she is lacking in comprehension. A. seems to have a desire to quickly read through a book. She reads often and usually chooses series which she tries to finish as quickly as possible. Because of this, her comprehension suffers. When questioning A. about the Amelia Earhart passage, we found that she missed the explicit questions, indicative that she was rushing through the reading and not thinking about what she read. She needed to look back in order to even find the information that we were questioning her about. We found the same results on her retelling of a passage of Harry Potter that she read aloud to us; she left out important information.
Our plan for the next class session is to have A. read the other 4th grade passage and ask her to slow down. That is also the goal for the lesson that we will create for her: to have her read slower and stop to think about what she is reading. Currently, when she picks up a book after stopping for a period of a few hours she has to reread a page or so to refresh her memory as to what is going on. We are hoping to get a better idea of what level of book to choose for her for the lesson, as we suspect she may either be reading at a level that is too high for her, or it may just be that she needs to take higher level books at a slower pace.
It sounds like comprehension is a great skill to work on with your buddy. I am sure A will appreciate your help once she realizes all the juicy details that she missed in Hairy Potter because she was reading too fast. Because your buddy appears to have a pretty good set of fundamental reading skills, comprehension sounds like a great place to take her. It was not until this literacy class that I realized that because a student can read fluently, it does not always mean that the student comprehends at the same level. One strategy that you are thinking of using is simply slowing down, if that does not seem to improve her comprehension, what additional strategy would you choose for her?
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Jamie,
ReplyDeleteI would like her to slow down and think about what she is reading. I would start with a lot of stopping and thinking like Nancy demonstrated in class. As she gets better at it, I would like to see if she doesn't need to stop as often.
Very interesting that she missed all the explicit questions. How did she do on the implicit ones? It sounds like A is a great reader when it comes to decoding new words, but it does sound like her comprehension is still struggling. It definitely sounds like you need to have her slow down to make sure she is comprehending what she is reading. I am wondering if your lesson to have her slow down should be more of a strategy to help her understand what she is reading. I am thinking that she might read fast because she doesn't have the skills to determining meaning of a text. Teaching her to visualize what she is reading (making a movie in her head) would be a great way for you to get her to slow down and really think about what she is reading.
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Gretchen,
ReplyDeleteYou did a good job evaluating our buddy. When she was telling us she thought she would get through Harry Potter in a week, I was wondering how much she would remember from the text. Last week, she had just a few chapters left to read. I would be interested to know what she could tell us about the story. It has been a long time since I read the book, but I am curious to hear what she has to say.
Last week when we gave her the second 4th grade reading, she asked us if she could read it silently and if we were going to ask her questions about it. We told her yes on both accounts. But knowing that she was going to have questions to answer, don't you think she would've read a bit more carefully?
Knowing what we know now, besides working on slowing down, would you like to work on some of the suggestions that Tovani gives in her book? I wonder too, do you think it is easier for her to remember more details from fiction pieces than non-fiction pieces? After reading a bit from Harry Potter, she could retell more of that than she could of either of the two non-fiction pieces. Just something to think about:)
Text selection seems important here. I wonder if poetry might be a good option for stopping and talking about what one is thinking and visualizing? Or maybe a mystery or adventure story that lends itself to stopping and thinking about clues?
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