Seymour Simon: One Book- Many Uses

One Book: Many Uses

 Wildfires by Seymour Simon

     Seymour Simon's books are great to use in the classroom.  Simon has written hundreds of books on a variety of non-fiction subjects.  His pictures are engaging, and he writes without using typical non-fiction features.  This type of non-fiction writing mirrors what my fourth graders are expected to read and understand during their high-stakes state testing.  Because of this, I decided to use this book with both my entire class and two of my small groups.  By using the same text in small group, I save time by skipping the actual reading of the text.  I also find it easier to elicit critical thinking when using a familiar text.

     First, let me explain a little about how I use small groups.  For my reading structure, I use The Daily Literacy CAFE which is a combination of Gail Boushey and Joan Moser's Daily Five (which is what the children do independently) and CAFE (their assessment to instruction model for teacher-directed lessons and small group work).  All of my groups are based on skills, not reading level.  Currently, my Monday-Wednesday- Friday group is working on main idea and my Tuesday-Thursday group is working on cause and effect.  

 

     The "Main Idea" group started with taking copies of the text and dividing it into sections, based on the main idea.  In order to show this process clearly, we they literally cut and pasted the text into sections.  Then each section was given a title that reflected the main idea.  There work is in green in the above picture, with key words highlighted and circled.

      The "Cause and Effect" group underlined causes in red and effects in blue. 

First Attempts at a True RtI Model

A few weeks ago, I found this video via Pinterest.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NsyvFN8kX8&feature=youtu.be

I love how everything in the binder was organized and the strong link between assessment and instruction.  However, the binder was designed for much younger students (K-2) with reading difficulties (phonics, accuracy, fluency) that lend themselves to keeping track of data in this way.  My students are entering fifth grade, and those that I am most worried about have comprehension issues.  Comprehension, as a skill, does not lend itself to numeric data.  As I saw it, there were three barriers to implementing something like this that I needed to overcome:
1) a form to assess and graph progress weekly
2) 20-30 one-page passages, per reading level, to assess comprehension each week for twenty to thirty weeks
3) a quick, consistent, easy-to-administer comprehension check that can be converted into a number to be graphed 
4) multiple ways to teach comprehension skills
I think I have finally created this and I share my first attempt here.  Feedback welcome!
Intervention Tracking Sheet
My intervention tracking sheet is a bit more generic and doesn't contain the "digging deeper" assessments that are part of the video, since I don't have them.  I will make do with all the other data I have, which is recorded in other places.  There is a nice big space to graph weekly assessments.  Here is the link to the document in Google docs:

https://sites.google.com/a/sau61.org/mrsjones/Reading%20Progress%20Monitoring%204%20BLOG.docx?attredirects=0&d=1

"Dedicated" Passages to Assess Comprehension
I purchased Daily Reading Warm-Ups from Teacher Created Resources with 150 passages each.  I purchased a third grade, fourth grade, and fifth grade version.  Expensive?  Yes, but it is worth the price to not have to create passages from scratch.  I can just hand them the book- no photocopying needed.  These book will NOT be used for instruction, only assessment.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1420634917/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i02

Numeric Value for Comprehension Check
I decided to use retells as my comprehension check.  They are consistent and easy to administer.  I created a form that assigns a numeric value for each element of a retell and put this in a chart form.  It is available on Teachers Pay Teachers via this link:

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Scoring-a-Retelling

Multiple Ways to Teach Comprehension
For a long time I have been influenced by the work of Judith Irwin in reading comprehension.  I will be using her "seven dimensions" of comprehension to guide my instruction.

http://www.amazon.com/Promoting-Active-Reading-Comprehension-Strategies/dp/0137312415/ref=cm_cr-mr-title

My plan is to teach strategies for one "dimension" at a time using Irwin's resource book, assessing the results in overall comprehension weekly. If a student does not make progress for two weeks in a row, I will switch to a different "dimension" and set of strategies.  So it should take a maximum of 14 weeks (or about one trimester) to be able to find the dimension that the child is having difficulty with.
For more information about data-based decision making, read the article:  "Tier III Assessments, Data-Based Decision-Making, and Interventions" by Kristin Powers and Arpita Madal from California State University, Long Beach.

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