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.
I really like how you created a puzzle to retell and summarize the story. I think this is a really neat idea for students to show that that understand and comprehend the story. I also think that students would enjoy the activity too!
ReplyDeleteI did like this activity, but I agree that they should have maybe been in groups that were reading the same book. It seemed kind of difficult for the other students to understand the mystery if they are not on the same book as another student. It is important however, that the students do have choices on the books that they choose to read.
ReplyDeleteI love this! This is a fantastic project for younger students. I am always curious why types of projects elementary school students do, since I was homeshcooled until high school. I think this would be so much fun, and yet would force the kids to really think about which details they want to include in the puzzle. The only issue I would have with this is if you did assign it as an out-of-school project, how would you know the students would be able to pick up on what to include in their puzzle? Also, does it take more time to draw and cut out the puzzle than it does to think of the things to include in the puzzle? I hate to create projects that take longer to complete simply because of the level of difficulty of the project, rather than taking time to reinforce that main concept in perhaps a different way.
ReplyDeleteI think that although the children did not read the same books, it is ok! It relies on context clues, and while most of the students will probably be a little off on naming the book and discovering what the book was about, I think the thought process behind that thinking is very important. I think writing a description under each picture might of been more helpful but overall, I think its very cool! Your experience was so much different than mine. I enjoyed reading this because it again shows me how much more advanced some students are over others. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI think that this is a neat idea to have the kids to organize their memory/perspective of the story this way. I do agree with you in that it would be challenging if the students were not all reading the same mystery book. But, maybe it would challenge the students or motivate them to read another story based on these puzzles relating to their interests.
ReplyDelete-Erica Jones