Reading

Curriculum

  • Our main focus in Reading at SLMS is to teach the skill of reading comprehension so students have multiple tools to use while trying to understand what they are reading. Some of these are: being metacognitive (or thinking about their thinking), finding main idea and supporting details in non-fiction, summarizing, beginning, during, and after reading strategies, and generating and answering questions, to name a few.
  • We use the Junior Great Books and hold class discussions about the stories and interpret meaning ourselves (which means that Mr. Stockman doesn’t have all the answers).
  • As the purpose of reading is to simply understand what you read we practice, practice, practice comprehending various texts.

Accelerated Reader (AR)

Find information here about the requirements for AR and the AR Bookmark.

Independent Reading

All students are required to have an independent reading book at all times. This book will be a novel or a story, as long as there are chapters and characters who “do things”, i.e., there is a plot with complications and such.
This book can come from a home library, borrowed from my classroom library, the Pierce County Library system, or the SLMS Library which we visit every Friday. If a student finishes a book prior to our library time on Friday it is their responsibility to get a new book.

How to choose a book

Students need to read at what is called their Independent Level, where they understand 96%-100% of the words. They can handle slightly more difficult text in class because there is a teacher there to help them with comprehension. If a student chooses a book that is too difficult for them to understand they will either stop reading altogether or return it only to get another difficult book.

Here’s a couple simple tests to see if a book is at the right reading level:

  • Have the student count out 100 words on a page and then check how many they understand. If they can’t pronounce or know the definition of more than 4 words it is too difficult.
  • Or, choose a full page of text and if there are more than 5-6 unknown or difficult words (depending on the size of the text and the page) they need to choose a different book.

Resources

Reading Rockets: Strategies to Help Kids Who Struggle with Reading