As of January 21st..

After today's Mills meeting, I have decided that I am going to focus only on my higher reader/s and on what growth in reading looks like for them. I have dropped 2/3 rd of my target learners in order to pursue an understanding of differentiated instruction for the higher readers. I hope that is okay.

I started the year with the question: In what way do my students need to grow in their reading? What do they know? What do they not know? What do they need to learn?

I realize that for the most part students who are lower or and mid readers make the appropriate progress or visible progress... it is easy for me to see they came in reading at level A and by the end of the year they might be reading level E or if they are mid level readers they might have come in reading E and leaving at I or J... usually they make visible, tangible progress.

The progress or lack of progress that higher readers make is less visible. These are students I find the hardest to get to since I am focused on the struggling ones; these are students I rarely do running records with, or give least feedback to. I have been astonished in the past that at the time of conferences I am found without very few data sources to back my assumption that they are doing well.

I realized that I need to figure out what do these students need in my class?

These are students who come in with strong reading, fluency, accuracy and comprehension. These students consistently read series books like Magic Tree House, Junie B. Jones etc. that have a predictable format and not a whole lot of character development; and although they may miss a lot of the story, manage to get the gist and retell partially. They do have trouble summarizing what they have read at these higher levels. These students do not like to retell and I am wondering if they don't like to retell because they are really not fully grasping the story and it is then harder to summarize, or they love to read and don't want to take the time to respond or it is something else?

My focus is on Jasper. He is really into reading Magic Tree House books. When I sat down early in the year, I could see that although he doesn't use higher level vocabulary, he is really tuned in to new words he wants to know; able to think and talk about his own understanding and struggles while reading -- "words that don't follow the spelling rules are hard to figure out, like light" he said. He is self aware. At the same time, he really resists retelling. And although in principle in believes in reading a variety of books, when I look in his book bag, I find anywhere from 4-7 Magic Tree House books.

I need to do rethink… what the next steps are…