"Differentiated Reading Instruction" Chapter 4 - Reading Response

by Laura Robb

Differentiated Reading Instruction is almost a requirement now in the mainstream classrooms. With students all over the reading levels in almost every grade, teachers need to be able to differentiate instruction and assessments for all students. This chapter covers how to differentiate instruction during whole-class reading.

Key Points

This chapter covers frequent questions asked about Differentiated Whole-Class Instructional Reading (pgs. 102-106), examples of lesson plans and unit plans with differentiated books and activities (pgs. 109; 111-114), and how to hold conferences with your students to assess their progress (pgs. 115-end).

Responses to the Prompts

1. How did this chapter help you understand how to use whole group instructional reading and differentiation?

Through this chapter, I understand how to use whole group instruciton reading by matching books and assessing my students through conferences to gauge their understanding. By understanding how to do this, I can figure out to differentiate all the reading materials for my lessons. My students will have different reading levels and subsequently need different books to read for their independent reading time/use for their assignments. Laura Robb detailed the importance of this through her week-by-week planning and examples of conferences with students.

This chapter gave me resources that I have been searching for for almost a year now. I've been trying to understand how I can differentiate my future classroom without leaving any child out. In my lessons, I am asked to differentiate my lessons according to the students in the classroom, but often I couldn't think of how to differentiate the process and product instead of the content and difficulty. During this chapter, I learned several new ways to differentiate my whole-group reading instruction through matching books and conferences. I liked how detailed the author is about the lessons and the detail she puts into the explanations. She makes it seem effortless to differentiate instruction with your students and plan out whole lessons. At least now I have the resources to create these lessons and cater them to my students.

1. Discuss two types of conferences that the author mentions and tell how you might use these with lower grades.

Retellings

Retellings ask a student to retell/recall and summarize what they remember about a story or passage that he/she read. It can be as short as two paragraphs or as long as a novel. Retellings need to be detailed and include important points of the passage/book in them. These can be used in all grades, but for the younger grades it's harder because they are focusing on decoding as well as comprehension. For these younger students, you can teach them using "hand retellings" and have each of the five fingers and the palm represent a part of the story. Usually this includes main characters, setting, conflict, and such. This works well for kindergarten and first grade. By second or third grade, the students can begin filling out graphic organizers or making "story retelling" figures that still follow the five finger retellings, but require more effort and thought to be put into them.

Book Conferences

Book conferences have the students talk about "narrative elements and features of informational texts" (Robb, 2008, p. 121). They also make text connections to themselves, other texts, and to the world around them. These types of conferences deepen understandings and connections to the books that the students are reading; students must take the information they know to make deductions and inferences about the text. In the lower grades, students can easily connect to stories with experiences of their own during partner work or whole group discussions. They can also use partner work to help each other connect to the book and understand its elements and features.

Questions for Discussion

1. If you want to build your library before you become a teacher, what are some easy ways to find masses of books without breaking your wallet?

2. I am currently in a first grade classroom for field studies, and I watch my teacher do the conferences with her students in groups. How can you keep track of all the stuff you talk about if you do groups instead of individual work?

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