My buddy, E, is a gregarious 4th grader. He enjoys reading and writing fantasy stories. In particular, he seems to be quite interested in futuristic fantasy stories. He is a strong reader - both fluent and accurate. On both of the 4th grade level reading passages he scored in the 75th percentile, while only making 1 or 2 miscues per passage. He did well with comprehension questions using explicit recall. However, he struggled a bit with implicit questions. He was able to find clues in the text with a look-back, but he had trouble self-generating his replies to the implicit questions when first asked.
Based on E's results from his assessments and his interest in futuristic stories, I am thinking about creating a lesson designed to help his comprehension around implicit recall questions using a text he would find interesting. I'd like to work with him on using strategies to identify important information in the text, while activating his background knowledge to help make inferences. The lesson would satisfy GLE 2.1.5 -Apply comprehension strategies before, during, and after reading: predict and infer from grade level informational/expository text and/or literary/narrative text.
I agree with the path of your forward movement into instruction. With a student like E, I'm struggling thinking of ways to get him interested in creating inferences about a text's meaning. His recall ability and the near obsession he has with details quoted in the text, are almost proving to be a hindrance for his comprehension. So far, I've seen that he needs either direct text or background knowledge about the information or text in order to make connections and inferences about deeper meanings.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading your thoughts, I‘m percolating on:
What influence and difference can we make if we utilize and focus on his willingness to use background knowledge to create a deeper meaning? But what if he doesn’t have any? …
What can we dig up to help him utilize the specific details he remembers in order to create an implied or deeper meaning? I'm thinking, if we are able to show him that the details he remembers are important to help him draw other conclusions about the text, he might have more of an incentive to do so? His interest in "getting it right" could help drive a further push to inferring meaning from texts.
I wonder how making inferences and determining main ideas would fit together in a lesson using one text. An alternative is to focus on one or the other, depending on which was a more natural fit for the text you might select.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your assessment that focusing on making inferences will help his comprehension skills. You mentioned strategies, though. Will you be working on more than one strategy? If so, what and how many? Do you think it might be too overwhelming to introduce more than one strategy at a time to master, in such a short time frame?
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