Rationale
In my First Grade classroom, students started the school year reading at varying guided reading levels, from above to below grade level reading. There was a wide range of needs, which called for restructuring of guided reading groups to accommodate and meet the needs of each student. Even after having half a semester of experience teaching these specific guided reading groups independently, I still felt unorganized and inexperienced in teaching my reading groups. I observed other classrooms’ reading groups as well as watched my mentor and literacy facilitator teach my own groups to get a better understanding of how to make the groups efficient and focused on certain skills. I also planned guided reading lessons with my mentor and literacy facilitator, to better understand where my focus should be and with time efficiency.
Initially, my students made minimal growth in guided reading. The minimal growth within the guided reading groups was a result of a lack of skills including: word decoding, sight word identification, fluency, and comprehension. Students were not making skill connections from book to book, and thus did not move up as many guided reading levels as we would have hoped for after having over 3 months of guided reading groups. As students would use the target skills typically during guided reading group with a teacher, the hope would be that eventually students could use them also while independently reading and in whole group reading lessons. This area of need was identified after seeing low comprehension scores in running records, low amounts of students able to identify high frequency words, and many errors in decoding while reading. |
As students showed many needs in different areas of reading, it carried over into our whole-group reading lessons where students were unable to make any comprehension connections. They were also unable to then go back and work independently on many comprehension-related activities that were related to the readings. Making text connections and answering comprehension questions has a huge importance in showing students the reasons for reading and its relevance. Reading is the basic foundation of learning, especially for students in early grades. As my students were unable to read independently to decode text and make connections to answer comprehension questions, the reading level movement suffered and the overall understanding of basic reading comprehension skills was lacking.
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Data
- At the end of Quarter 1, 17 out of 21 students were proficient in reading at Level E or above - 4 were progressing at Level D.
- Running record data shows lack of comprehension skills even with high text level reading.
- Students struggled using reading strategies while decoding words - lots of guessing.
- Students showed little growth in their text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world connections while reading, expressed in running record data.
- Students struggled to apply the introduced concepts in their individual and independent reading, shown within reading journal responses.
At the beginning of the school year, 8 out of 21 students were reading at text level D, and 6 more were reading at text Level E. Of the 21 students, 13 of them started out at the proficient level of reading at E or above.
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At the end of Q1, the average number of high frequency words read by students was 48/60 words. There were 15 out of 21 students at or above the average score.
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