One of my biggest struggles as an upper elementary CI teacher is finding materials for my kids to read that are both age appropriate/interesting and at their reading level. There are many times in the library when my students will pick out chapter books that they can't read just because they want to be reading what their friends are reading or they want to read a book on that topic. The books at the lower levels can be really difficult to ask comprehension questions with because many times the books in their reading levels don't actually have a story, but rather follow a repetitive structure such as " the ____ is red". The students look at the picture and then fill in the blank.
I decided this year to try some chapter books. I know my students have much higher listening comprehension than reading comprehension so I wanted to try a high-interest chapter book with them to push their love of reading as well as some of the comprehension goals. This way we were able to read a book and answer deeper comprehension questions like "why did the character feel that way?", etc. I used the Jigsaw Jones chapter book series for this time around. I read the book ahead of time and for each chapter I chose 3 main events. I made pictures to represent each event, cut them out, and had them ready to go in a simple folder to keep it all organized. After reading each chapter together, I had the students sequence the three events. My higher students were able to add sentences to go with each event to further explain what happened.
It was exciting for me to see my students look forward to reading groups and make deeper connections with the higher level text. I still found ways to work on other reading skills such as decoding and vocabulary (and my para pros run groups at the same time that focus on these skills as well) but I was really excited to be able to push my students' comprehension to a deeper level. It was a lot of work up-front to create the pictures/events for each chapter but I am hoping to create these documents for multiple chapter books so that it will be less work in the future. It's not a perfect system yet, but I'm excited to have this as an option for my readers.
Have you found ways to meet the interest/comprehension needs of your older readers who are still reading at a pre-primer or primer level?
-Anna
I decided this year to try some chapter books. I know my students have much higher listening comprehension than reading comprehension so I wanted to try a high-interest chapter book with them to push their love of reading as well as some of the comprehension goals. This way we were able to read a book and answer deeper comprehension questions like "why did the character feel that way?", etc. I used the Jigsaw Jones chapter book series for this time around. I read the book ahead of time and for each chapter I chose 3 main events. I made pictures to represent each event, cut them out, and had them ready to go in a simple folder to keep it all organized. After reading each chapter together, I had the students sequence the three events. My higher students were able to add sentences to go with each event to further explain what happened.
It was exciting for me to see my students look forward to reading groups and make deeper connections with the higher level text. I still found ways to work on other reading skills such as decoding and vocabulary (and my para pros run groups at the same time that focus on these skills as well) but I was really excited to be able to push my students' comprehension to a deeper level. It was a lot of work up-front to create the pictures/events for each chapter but I am hoping to create these documents for multiple chapter books so that it will be less work in the future. It's not a perfect system yet, but I'm excited to have this as an option for my readers.
Have you found ways to meet the interest/comprehension needs of your older readers who are still reading at a pre-primer or primer level?
-Anna
