Trends in Reading

My kids were describing their characters, outside and in, today. I phrase outside and in because the outside is often the most common first go-to for my kiddos when it comes to describing characters. The start is often something like...

• Well he is tall, with brown hair.


• She is a girl that is 12 who has short curly hair.

What I have stressed is that the external characteristics are not the only important piece of information. It certainly helps you visualize what the author is trying to convey, letting you truly see who that character is in your minds-eye. But the real work begins when you start to understand who the character is, what they do, and how they interact with others (next week we'll work on how you take those characteristics and hypothesize/theorize about solutions). It is fascinating to see the evidence kids provide for characteristics, and how they put it all together.

But where this is going is how successful my kids are with specific skills in reading. Today was story elements (GLE 2.2.3? or 1? or something like that) while tomorrow might be predictions. Either way I need to track those individual skills. Previously I mentioned how reading is often seen (by me at least) holistically. You might not be good at predicting, but you can evaluate, compare, and identify story elements. As a whole you are in good shape. But for me I need to do a better job tracking those individual skills. So what I am doing is breaking out my assessment by the pieces I am doing for my instruction- ie. story elements, inferring, etc. I'll still track the whole. But I want to be sure I am watching the individual skills. This way I can filter assessments, and see whether those are part of an overall trend (i.e. not very successful with story elements) or whether it was a blip on the screen. The visual in simply playing around today was powerful, and should help me better meet kids needs.