Kara

= Kara's Tutoring Portfolio = toc

Week 1
This week I started working with my 4th grade girl, Kashijion. She was a spunky and bright young lady. We read The Giving Tree and played sight words bingo which she had no struggle with. We played a little scatorgies while we talked about our families. She informed me that she loves reading but wants to read faster. Her parents read very fast and that is what she considered a good reader. This is the way many students look at reading "well" so i usually like to tell them about my dad. He is a painfully slow reader. However, as soon as he is finished you can as him anything about the information read and he can answer any question at times even quote the book or segment. He does not read fast so once i have told those i am wroking with about him i ask, "Is he a good reader?". They usually say he is and then understand that the key to reading is not speed even if some tests are being adminstrated with time limietes and mere completion. I htink that reading should be mroe than rushing through to be finished.

Hi Kara,

I, too, have found that fast reading is an impression students tend to interpret as an indication of a good reader. My student reads so hurriedly, that I feel bad for the book she is reading and for her; for the book, there is a lack of appreciation and for her, savoring the text is not possible at such a hurried rate. Similar to when you see someone gobble down or inhale their meal, you wonder how they can savor and enjoy the eating experience. I openly share with students that in order for me to be the best reader, reading for knowledge and reading for enjoyment, I am not a fast reader. It certainly does not mean that we can't read fast, it just means that when you take your time, you are able to pick up more of what the author is trying to convey, and students are better able to make deeper, richer inferences. Another analogy would be watching a movie. Do they fast forward through the movie when watching? Why not? This is the same concept. The pendulum in education is never static; trust me, ten years from now when you have gained a solid teaching experience, there will be a push against reading fluency marked by rate of words per minute. I am hoping it is far sooner than that. :)

If this is how the school district assesses their reading, fine-students can read this way when being assessed; however, for "real" reading when they are not being assessed-majority of the reading experience, read at your independent, preferable reading rate.

I think and believe wholeheartedly that you are correct in your statement: reading is more than rushing through to be finished.

Keep up the great work!

Best, Natalie

__**2nd reading session**__
After a week off due to scheduling I returned back with Kashijion. This week I did my running record and we tried to establish the book we would read for the year. I brought Bunnicula and we read a chapter in that. Part of that was her running record and she did fine but did get hung up on some of the words. This level was selected only for the running record and yet she really wanted to keep reading and finish the chapter. We did and then I asked her what she had read and understood from the reading. She comprehended great and knew the point of view (it is from the dog’s perceptive.) She asked some great questions during reading and we explained it and related it to her family and her pets. This made phrases like (in describing the bunny) it looked like Chester (the cat) but with longer ears and a motor on its nose a little easier to understand and even amusing. This connection to a car motor and a bunny’s nonstop motion of its nose made her giggle which is why they choose to write that. We also did a little song comprehension. I had printed song lyrics and wanted to watch the corresponding videos. However my internet was not strong enough to show videos so we read some of the lyrics and discussed what they meant and their word choice selection. For next week I hope to do a little more with that and give her a selection of books to start reading and we will book walk to being the novel were going to dive into. One thing I noticed about the reading we were doing is she often skips lines and wont catch herself. I think to remedy this I will get her a bookmark that guides her reading but I don’t know how to get her to realize herself that what she just read was disjointed and that she needs to go back and find out why.

**__3rd Reading Session__**
Last night Kashijion and I choose a book we would read this semester. I first gave her a choice between 4 or 5 books of her ability level and if different lengths. I picked a mystery, one with a lot of pictures, one written in poetry, a novel that would push her a little more, one of those magic tree house books about thanksgiving if she wanted to learn more about that and one based around a dog. The books subjects were based around different things she expressed liking. To get to know the books we opened them up saw the pictures the font ect. After describing each one a little I let her choose. First she said we wanted to read them all. So I asked her to take one away and again until there were two. This gave me a feel for what we would read next if time permits. It came down to three then it was hard. So she went narrowed it down and chose. To focus on this book we did a pre-reading strategy, List Group Label. So we had the chalk board which she loved writing on, and she wrote to the topic of Home. The first word out of her mouth was comfortable. Then objects, and family members. She wrote them all on the board and often she worried about spelling. I told her as long as both of us know what it says it’s not necessary to spell it right. But with other words she really wanted to know, so we sounded it out and compared it to other words that it sounded like. After we had a ton of words on the board (like 25 even though I was only accepting 15-20) I told her to group them together any way she liked. The next step was to label the groups but as she was grouping she was telling me all of this is in my kitchen, this is everyone in my family, and this is the furniture in my house. So when it came to “label” I just asked her to reiterate and explaining why she didn’t put any other items in the list. As she was explaining these to me she noticed that the definitions we put up were not on any of her groups so she made one labeled definition. This had the definition of family, house and home. It was good to talk about the difference between a house and a home. She mentioned comfortable yet again and said that is a home. A house is just where you sleep. Once this was done we started reading. She liked that the book was written in poetry and that will help her with her fluency. The young girl in the book really likes astrology and little did I know so does Kashijion. This was a wonderful surprise and I will surely incorporate this into other tutoring sessions.

Week 4
Kashijion and I started with a KWL chart of the book we started last week. We went over what we had read with the K portion and looked back in the book for more details. We then filled out what we want to know from the rest of the book. This included a few things about space because she likes the stars and so does the main character. She also wondered if the mom would like her room and she wanted to know more information about different characters. Then we read some of the book stopping to make predictions or retell what important information was covered. Then just before we were through I asked her to tell me a little bit about what we read. Then she drew a small picture of something that related to her life and was one of her favorite parts of the story so far. This was a slumber party with the narrator’s best friends. She read and then talked about her friend and all the fun they have together. Then I made sure to end on a cliff hanger page. This book filled with poems had one about the girls family and it starts talking about how sad her dad is. He seems out of whack and he has been talking with her mom lately. She wonders if her parents are getting a divorce. Gasp. This made Kashijion literally gasp and ask to keep reading and wanted another hour. I asked her what she thought. And what other reasons could be behind someone feeling like he did. She tried to think of a few and said, “Oh I hope it’s not a divorce. That would be horrible.” I asked her to think about what else it could be and why she thinks that and to get excited to find out when she comes back on Tuesday.

Hi Kara,

I enjoyed witnessing your sessions through your writing-thanks for sharing. It is interesting that Kashijion is predicting the father's sadness due to a possible divorce. Your invitation to come up with more ideas that may be influencing her father's mood will be a great warm-up exercise to get you back into the book. Also, I enjoyed seeing that you are incorporating poetry into the readings-I am delighted she is reading from a poetry book. Your pre-reading strategy of List Group Label and the way you facilitated her selection of a book were excellent!!!

Keep up the great work.

Thanks! Natalie

Week 5
So this week we had left on a cliff hanger in our book. So to refresh our memory I wanted us to do a “previously in Where I Live” In soap opera voices as if it was a sitcom that you meet up with once a week. So we described what was going on and then read the last page that we left on. This yet again built the anticipation that we left on last time which was great. We talked about what could happen and yet again she mentioned divorce as well as cancer and illness in general. She had remembered there being a Grandpa in the story and wondered if it could be related to him. Then I asked her which one she thought it was in the book and she was unsure. So to find out we read on. We read to find out what was going to happen and how that would affect the main character. When we had 10 minutes left I wanted Kashijion to write a poem (the format of the book) before doing this I asked her if poems have to rhyme or have a certain format and asked her what the requirements were. She told me that they don’t have to rhyme and that really there were no rules as long as you wanted it to be a poem. So we wrote our poems for a little bit and then read them to each other. Hers was about how the main character should keep in touch with her best friend even though she is moving away. Her friend moved away and she had advice for her. It was short and concise. She wrote in steps for the character to take. With just one or two minutes left I asked her if she wanted to write another, read a little more or do an activity. She wanted to read a few more pages.

W eek 6
This week in our tutoring session I started with discussion the way plot works- I showed Kashijion the standard plot diagram: intro, raising action, conflict, climax, and falling action. We first discussed points we remembered from the book. This helped to refresh what had happened; these weeks between readings are hard to start with. So when we had major points we discussed what each part of the plot they were and color coded the writing we had. We then read to find out what the climax would be and once we were done reading we wrote a few sentence on the white board (which she loved) about what had happened and how that changed our predictions. We are almost done reading the book – I hoped we could finish it before thanksgiving break but she loves discussing each page she reads and tells me what her predictions are along with making personal connection. This is great reading so I try not to discourage it. I have started to tell her she can read 3 pages (because they are poems its rather short) and then can tell me things or if she is in the middle of a poem I tell her to finish and then talk about it.  I wanted to start writing stories after but we read and discussed the book through the hour.

Week 7
This week Kashijion and I finished our book!!! We then talked about what happened in the end and what we thought of it. For the activity to guide our retelling, I asked her to make a comic strip of the book. I have three long panels and told her she could break them up write captions and dialog – anything she wanted. I showed her a picture of a comic strip just to refresh her memory of what I was anticipating. She drew a few simple stick figures and had a majority of captions. The first panel summed up the second half of the book and then the next two were images and captions that she thought would happen if the book continued. Next week we are going to do our running record and I feel that her improvement will show. She definitely has gained confidence, fluency and different strategies to use when coming to an unfamiliar word.

Week 8
This week Kashijion did not show up. :( I had a running record and writing along with a compound word card game and reading some universe books. The book we read had some talk of space and astronomy, so when we started we did a KWL chart and learned a lot about the character but not as much as we wanted about hte universe. I even had a page bookmarked in regards to a term the charater kept talking about: nebula. I will email and hopefully make up the time but last time it did not work out. I hope that next week we can fit everything in and that i choose the correct level for hte running record. It will be my last time to see her. Its crazy that this semester is almost over already!