It was good to meet with many of you over the February reports. A number of parents asked about reading levels for each grade, so I thought I've post a link showing the connection between the letter levels, DRA levels, and what each grade is expecting, more or less.
When we talk reading, there are two main components: Decoding and Comprehension. At first, we want to make sure that decoding is happening and build fluency, but particularly as students go up the grade levels, more often we're asking them to prove their understanding of a text, and that can be trickier to quantify.
So as students begin to approach end grade 1 level decoding skills, I'm really shifting my focus to building their ability to write about their reading and express their understanding.
Here's the chart I'm talking about:
http://rsd407.org/curric/elemglance/readingbenchmark/DRA-BookLevelChart.pdf
I also had a great conversations about sharing resources and was really excited to have these books come in from Carver's family to support our literacy program. We've read a number of books about jazz and blues artists this month and listened to at least one song from each artist. Muddy Water's Mannish Boy has been the favourite, I think, which is interesting because Nina Simone's Feeling Good was way more polarizing last week.
We also had a field trip this week at HPNC. Last time, we learned about squirrels. This time students speculated that we'd learn about another animal and my favourite guess was mountain lion. What we really learned about was noticing animal clues, like food clues, footprints, scat, or bits of fur and feathers. Students explored these inside, then we took our birdfeeders outside and went for a hike to notice some of these things.
Best,
Ms. Goegan
