Kim Stark and I met on February 25 for our 3rd coaching meeting.  We are in the Take Action phase of the Vector cycle.  Kim has identified an ELL student that she is working with who is reading fluently but is having difficulty comprehending informational text. Kim’s goal is that by the testing window in April, the ELL students score on informational text will grow from a 205 to a 212 on the MAP test.

To achieve this goal, Kim is meeting with the student in a tutorial session before school each day.  She is specially working on txt features and is using the Read Naturally curriculum as the basis for her work.  Another student is included in the before school tutoring and they partner read as well as answering comprehension questions which require knowledge of text structures.

A strategy that Kim has decided to use not only with the ELl student but with the entire class is a writing strategy in which they will choose a topic of interest and be assigned to write an informational piece about the topic using an identified text structure such as compare and contrast.  Using this strategy Kim hopes not only to meet the goal of her ELL student, but also to improve reading comprehension for all of her students.

Kim was appreciative of the resources I had sent her, especially the information about teaching comprehension within the Science of Reading structure.