Moving From Assessment to Instruction - Reading Lesson Ideas

T enjoys reading.  He usually reads every night, at least 20 minutes.  He likes adventure/fantasy books.  Currently he’s reading a book called, Sasquatch by Roland Smith.  He told me that this book is easy for him to read but he’s enjoying it.  He wasn’t sure when he’s going to be finished reading it.  He estimated a couple of weeks (less than a month for sure).  T has good fluency when reading and uses some inflection but he doesn’t always pay close attention to the punctuation.  He often reads from one line to the next without pausing at the end of sentences and/or at commas.  He also reads very fast, but this doesn’t seem to affect his comprehension.  He a great speller, only missing one word from the spelling test I gave him during our first meeting.

T tested at the independent level on the Examiner Word Lists I gave him up through the seventh grade.  The only word he missed was desert, pronouncing it dessert.

The first reading passage from the Qualitative Reading Inventory book that I gave T was Pele.  He had never heard of him before but he knew the game of soccer very well.  He also knew what a professional athlete was.  He scored only a 67% on the concept questions for this narrative but he answered 7 of the 8 questions correctly at the end of the passage, scoring at the Independent level.  He had no miss-cues when he read this passage.   I later gave Thien two more passages to read from the Qualitative Reading Inventory book.  Overall, T seems to have pretty good comprehension when reading but I believe he would benefit from a lesson that would require him to clarify his thinking.  At times, he has difficulty articulating his ideas.  I also believe he would benefit from a lesson that would provide practice determining the most important idea an author is trying to make.          

I also believe T would benefit from a lesson on homonyms.  (He had previously confused desert with dessert).  The teacher may want to try dividing his students into two teams where a representative from each one take his or her place at the board in the front of the classroom as the teacher challenges them to write sentences using words that have more than one spelling and/or meaning (For example; Our principal was really testing the teacher’s principles.)  The two teams would compete with one another.  Having the students play a game would make this activity both fun and educational.