Yesterday my 4th grade son bought home a book that according the back cover is one in a series of 4th grade reading comprehension books. I think the series is through Mcmillin and Burnett and the stories are very short. For example the book yesterday was titled something like WHY TORTISE HAS A SHELL or maybe the 1st word was HOW, any way the story was only about 6 pages in regular print. I was estatic that my son was able to read the story with few errors on his own, stumbled on about 5 words-but did self correct! My question though is no comprehension questions were sent home. Does anyone know if this is like the SRA and the test are taken at school maybe? I asked my son my own questions but not sure I covered the intent of reading the story. Here is the type of questions I asked with his response.
Who is the main character? Tortise
Where does the story take place? Forest
Why was Tortise going to see lion? To get speed, climbing, slyther or fly.
What did Lion give Tortise? A shell
Why didn’t he give her speed, climbing, slyther or fly? because that is not what she needed.
What was Tortises first reaction? She was not happy but did not tell Lion that.
What happened that made Tortise change her mind when she was walking home? She liked the shell because she did not get wet on her way home.
Question is are these comprehension type questions? He seemed to answer them with relative ease so I thought maybe I was missing something.
Thanks for your responses.
Re: comprehension questions
Just seemed so easy. This is a kid who a short while ago could not even tell you what a story he read was about. Tonight he sat down and read me a chapter from James and the Giant Peach, just seems like so much growth in so short a time. I am very happy about it believe me, just a little shocked is all. Thanks for the vote of confidence.
Re: comprehension questions
When you say six pages in regular print — do you mean 12-point, like this display? Are the pages solid print, or mostly picture with just a strip of print? These things make a huge difference; some of the “books” that my students are bringing home are a joke, with hardly any actual reading at all.
Rather than counting pages, it’s much more productive to count words of text (count words on an average line and multiply by number of lines on the page).
100 to 500 total words would be very very short. Around 1000 words would be a reasonable short story. 2000 to 3000 would be a fairly major chunk of reading for Grade 4.
Then look at the difficulty of the words. “Slither” is quite an advanced word for Grade 4. Are there any other words that you would expect him to ask what you mean? If not, the comprehension level of the *vocabulary* is very low. In order to *increase* his vocabulary, there should be from two to five words on a page that he is not totally sure of (encourage him to work on meaning from context in these cases.) On the other hand, if the goal is to work on other skills besides vocabulary, it’s OK if the words are all easy for him.
Look at the length and complexity of the sentences. If they are all simple declarative statements (Tortoise went for a walk. She asked Lion for help.) then this is excessively simple. For Grade 4, there should be sentences with dependent clauses and variant word orders (“No”, said Lion, “I cannot give you the ability to slither, for that is now the property of Snake.”)
As far as your comprehension questions, the ones you asked are good *factual* comprehension questions, and this is definitely the place to start.
To go further, you need both opinions and inferences. Opinions: did you like the story? What was good/silly/dumb about it? What do you think of Tortoise? Inferences: Why is Lion the one who gives out the different abilities? How do you know from this sentence that Tortoise is slow? Why do you know ahead of time that Tortoise won’t get the ability to fly? What makes this story funny?
These can be discussed naturally in the context of reading, but it is important to go beyond the factual as a habit.
Re: comprehension questions
Thanks Victoria! The print was 12 pitch my best quess is the book had about 500 words. The sentences were not simple declarative sentences. The vocabulary did seem pretty simple as he did not need any of the words defined for him, he even knew what slither meant. It only took him about 6 minutes to read me the story. What the teacher did with the story was have the class do a “story map”. She sent a note home on Friday stating they were working on sequences of a story and were using short stories because a number of students were having difficulty remembering the sequences of stories. My son did very well on the test receiving a score of 98. I guess or discussing the story helped him to remember. I knew I did not probe deep into the story because I did not know what type of questions to ask, now I do. Thank you.
SOunds great — basically you reviewed the story including the “whys” and wherefores.
Why do you think you are missing something? Lots of kids who have troiuble reading are fine once they know what the words are, at least once they get to the point where they’re not spending all their energy figuring out the words.
This was also a pretty simple story — it made sense. Even if you missed half the words you could probably figure out the what happened (as long as you know what a tortoise is :-)) — especially if there are pictures.