Assessment to Instruction

 After getting to know two different buddies, I know have a third buddy to get to know all over again!  Though I have enjoyed these students, it is very difficult for me to gauge each new buddy's ability, strengths, and interests.  My new buddy, T, is an interesting kid.  Based on our first meeting, he is very soft-spoken and appears to read and write fairly well.  He has wonderful accuracy when reading, but does not retain a lot of information after the passage has been read.  After reading both stories (Amelia Earhart and Early Railroads), he read with amazing accuracy, but his level of comprehension put him in the frustration category.  A few things that caught my attention were his answers, word for word in the passages, when the questions related to technical or mechanical aspects of the story.  Since I am getting to know T, this gives me a jumping off point as to the sorts of stories he may be interested in reading or writing about in the future.


As a result of our findings, it would be logical to consider implementing a comprehension lesson as a shared reading lesson.  Because my first impression of him was shy and a little timid, I feel that shared reading would create a safe learning environment for him and the other students to to practice reading.  The teacher will model the behavior that a good reader would do while reading.  Tovani has many examples as to how she listens to her inside voice.  She also models how she asks questions, makes inferences, predictions, and opinions.  I also like how she promotes writing in the book (if allowed) to mark down these inside thoughts.  She also admits to daydreaming or easily becoming distracted for pages or two before realizing she hasn't been paying attention.  I think telling young readers that it is natural that things like that happen is important so that they don't feel like poor readers.  The lesson for T could be very simple as having the teacher model his/her thoughts while reading a short passage (maybe a paragraph).  While the students are following along, either on the doc-cam or reading from a class textbook, they can practice comprehension.  When the teacher vocalizes his/her thoughts, the students can easily observe how a good reader has a conversation with himself about what has just been read.  The teacher can place a sticky note on the page and write down any questions she had about the paragraph that may not have made sense or that more information is required to fully understand its message.  Then the students can practice this one strategy in their own independent reading time with sticky notes.  This would be a good start as an activity to build on reading comprehension.