When embarking on this project I wanted to encourage students to engage with literacy as often as possible. It is important to create healthy literacy and reading habits early on so students can carry these habits into adulthood. I extended the project to include reading at home, trying to help ingrain those healthy reading habits. Their reading counted towards the overall class competition with the same rules applying, for every 25 pages students received an entry form towards the Battle of the Books competition. I encouraged students to use the public library to access the resources they had to offer to support the reading at home. Partnering up with the library was a way for students to check items out from the library and continue improving their reading at home. This was teaching students how to access a resource to help encourage their progress in their reading success and a way to have variety in their literacy experience giving all students access no matter their demographics. The library card is free to children 17 and under.
Goal Tracking
Students chose their goals and tracked their progress through the activities they engaged with. Teaching students goal setting and making it meaningful to them was contingent on the ability to self reflect on ones own achievement and progress. The self reflection process I would argue was one of the most important parts of this process. To build intrinsic strategies students need to have the ability to self reflect on what they are engaging with and how they are progressing towards goals set. This reflection process was done one of 2 ways: 1) Students would write on a journal prompt focusing their reflection on some part of the process they engaged in. (E.g. if students were working towards the goal of comprehension they would reflect on their ability to identify the main ideas of their stories and what strategies they used to decide what the main ideas were) Or they would reflect on their performance towards their goal. (E.g. A possible prompt would be what action did you take to achieve your goal and why?)
2) The other way students would learn self reflection would be through the conferencing they would have with me weekly. I would focus the conversation on self reflection techniques to get students to identify what they did well, what they might not have done well and what they would do differently. For some students who lacked interest with literacy, I might focus the conversation on ways to choose activities or books related to interests and help students to identify what they were interested in.
Book Completion and Check In
When students completed their books they received an entry towards the Battle of the Books competition but they also were expected to answer comprehension questions. This was to formatively assessing students reading levels and to identify areas of struggle students might encounter. I realized most readers didn't enjoy reading, all the time and were typically struggling readers. Identifying areas where students struggled would help pinpoint the support or help students needed to improve their reading and literacy. One way I would assess this was using comprehension dice. Students would role the dice and answer the questions relating to the comprehension of the book. If students were not successful answering the comprehension questions I would inquire further to identify what they were struggling with.