For my Real-Life Reading Inquiry, I took notes while tutoring a 3rd grader that I work with multiple nights a week. For the purpose of this blog, we will call her Susie. Susie is in third grade at a private elementary school in Knoxville. Most days, Susie has some sort of reading homework. Susie brought home with her a reading project. As Susie’s tutor, we worked on the project together after she had finished reading a mystery book of her own selection. The teacher made up a project relating mysteries to puzzles. After reading the book, students were to create a puzzle with clues about the story they read.
(This is the book she choose)
In my opinion, this was not the BEST project to discover mysteries, but Susie enjoyed reading the book. I think it is an engaging activity to develop reading comprehension though. I do not favor the project because if all the children are not reading the same book, how would they have any clue how to put together someone else’s puzzle pieces? As shown in my pictures, we divided a poster board into 9 pieces.
( the instructions)
Each piece of the poster board puzzle was assigned a different topic from the book to be written in. These pieces are defined in the picture I took of the assignment. I do think it was good practice for Susie to work on locating things such as: the main character, the title, the author, setting, climax, and sequential parts of the book. She also had to discuss with me what main characters vs. secondary characters are. Puzzle pieces 5-7 were where Susie summed up the beginning, middle, and end of the book. This was good practice on how to summarize and show comprehension of what she had read. I had Susie tell me about it, and then we worked on making bullet points about what she summed up from the three sections. Susie is an intelligent girl that loves reading; she does not always need my help, other than to stay focused most of the time.
As Cunningham, P.M., & Allington, R.L. say in chapter 7, pp 183, Classrooms That Work: “Story Text Lessons are a good way for children to understand story structure and develop independent story comprehension strategies.” Overall, this project helped Susie with comprehension skills. She broke the book into parts of a story and summed it up in the designated parts of a story puzzle pieces. This project allows for students in the classroom to share their understanding of different mystery books they read. Susie explored the book further by telling me about the different parts of the story that were to be explained in each puzzle piece. I think this helped her to better understand the story because she was forced to think more about what she read. If Susie wanted to write specific things about the book, I had her go back and look for it in the book. She was able to more easily find specific details by knowing where that information would have been presented in the story: beginning, middle, end. For instance, she had to go back and look for three clues that helped solve the mystery. The final puzzle piece let Susie give a personal reflection of the book. She enjoyed the book so much that she let me borrow it. (If only I had time to read it) This project would be a useful project for all of us to use in a classroom. The instructions for puzzle pieces could be altered to fit different abilities. The level of books read could also be altered to best fit reading ability.
(Some pieces had prompts to draw pictures)
Drawing pictures also helped to show comprehension of reading. Susie likes to add pictures to stories to help visualize.
