Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Leveled reading systems

Twinkletwice, it sounds like they use AR well at your school! My daughter's level never moved up no matter how many 100 percent scores she earned (they kept saying it would move up after she earned three 100 prevents). I mentioned this on the capped reading level thread. She's at a different school now!

I've been trying to convince her to use the Kindle to look up words she doesn't know, but she's usually too involved to bother if she thinks she has figured it out. Having a Kindle for her has been a huge help. We ran out of bookcase space a long time ago and the extra features you mentioned are great!

Apm, can we message off the forum about books? I have NO ONE to kindle book share with. For instance, I have the first four heroes of olympus I can loan one time each. If we have girls with similar reading interests, we could book share. However, your daughter may be more advanced than mine. My little girl is seven (an August preemie) and in second grade. I have all the original percy Jackson, too. Except sea of monsters which I bought at goodwill. Also... All four familiars books. Those are cute and fluffy, but do have advanced language. The AR are easy on them.

Do you want to talk about it by pm? I know it's possible to share Kindle books, but it always seems like the books we want to share don't have that enabled.

I am 40 something and I constantly have mispronounced outliers because I read it before I heard it.

Out-liers but I say in my head out-lee-ers

I like AR, but I've always viewed it as purely extracurricular.

I don't think that it's a great tool for teaching reading skills, or for teaching comprehension, but it's fantastic for motivating kids to pick up a book when they might gravitate toward a video game. At least for competitive children like mine....;) Just makes my job easier, I guess.

I think whether harry potter caught the snitch in his hand or his mouth is trivial in the great scheme of the book. Words that I used often had pronouciation corrected but some were much later - berefit, Durham, Worcester,Warwick are the ones that spring to mind. Not being able to pronounce these didn't affect my reading. Most of the time a unknown word can be guessed in context or looked up later but dropping ruins the flow. One thing I was always grateful to my father for is he always supplied a definition without suggesting I look it up. I love dictionaries but not while I am trying to read (do like this on kindle though).

Anyway we don't have AR here though there may be something similar later and so far I have only disagreed with the teacher's assessment once. I think he had a bad day because he was moved up to where I thought he should be less than two weeks later.

What are they doing for language arts INSTRUCTION in the classroom? AR is not an instruction program. Are they doing reading groups working on making increasingly complex predictions, inferences, and connections? Are they comparing texts and exploring purpose? Is there weekly vocabulary instruction? Do they work on looking up unfamiliar words and selecting the correct definition?

I'm always shocked by schools who use AR as seemingly the sole means of instruction. Tests don't teach, they assess. For that matter, computers don't do a great job of teaching either. Teaching and true assessment happens best during interactions with a living, breathing, responsive teacher.

My kids school introduced the AR when my son was in K, and my daughter was in 5th. MOST K kids didn't use it, but my son's K teacher used it for enriching those few kids who were reading WAY above grade level. Except for the challenge in finding good books to fit his age, interest & reading level. I helped figured out that the best books for him that year were the Magic School Bus books, they had a high lexile 450-550L but were short. On the other hand my daughters 5th grade class quickly abandoned using they system because of the difficulty of finding age appropriate books for a class full of gifted readers.

In K as a supplementary teaching program, AR worked fine but by 3rd grade this was not longer an effective or interesting teaching method for him. It was hard to find books to fit his "level", the questions/test because a testing system that works fine for checking the reading comprehension of pictures books doesn't translate well to 200 page chapter books with complex themes.

I have stated in other threads about this, that I feel this system doesn't work well past about the 4/5th grade level (about 700-800 lexile). There are a number of reasons for this. Plus like all teaching methods, AR works well for some kids but certainly not all. And this certainly should NOT be the only method used to teach reading.

Basically I feel the Lexile system while it works OK for "leveling" early readers & early chapter books and can be a useful tool for steering kids to books that will be appropriate. It should not be the only tool for teaching or assessing reading.

AR is a big component of reading instruction, but they also write essays and do some worksheets. Because language arts is my daughter's strongest area, I'd like to find ways to challenge her more. We can work on things at home (e.g., she writes stories at home), but her school does work with me if I suggest ideas. It is difficult to find ideas that work without her needing too much individual help from the teacher. We are trying to work on it, though.

My son's class has a reading book that is a fourth grade reading book that the whole class gets reading instruction from (vocabulary, literary analysis, etc.) and there are additional readers from that publisher for small group instruction (each group has a different reader if they are English language learners, below level, on level or above level). So in the book they might read a fictional story about a topic together and then the small groups get the readers that might be non fiction on the same topic for small group instruction...I assume they don't have a group of readers above level enough to actually make a difference for my son. I think when they do the small groups they rotate to centers and one of the centers they do is have free time to read the book they have selected from the library (the ar book) and take the ar test if they are ready. The ar books he reads are the only time he is reading close to his instructional level.