Week 20 Fourth Grade

Taken by the Wind (Fiction, Level 13, Stage 3) by Joe Wahman

This week’s book Taken by the Wind is a story about a little girl and her younger brother who found themselves alone during a tornado and had to weather the storm the best they could without their parents to help them. Elijah enjoyed reading this book, although he said that it frightened him to think about having to go through something like that alone, and I really enjoyed this book because I believe it showed Elijah that he can do more than he knows, especially when it comes to protecting his younger brother.

The activity I want to highlight for this week is found in the Taking Turns Teaching Chart on the back of the Guided Lesson plan that accompanies this book. This chart guided me in showing Elijah how to summarize, question, clarify and predict during key points in the story, and through the Summarize step I discovered something important about Elijah’s skill level. I’ve known for some time that he seemed to be reading things pretty quickly, but I thought it was okay because he normally answered most of the comprehension and critical thinking questions correctly. Today, however, was another story completely when I discovered that he was not able to summarize as well as he should be, mainly because summarizing takes time, attention, and focus that he was not willing to give. So this week we made summarizing our focus in several different subjects, and I’ll continue to support him in growing this skill during the coming weeks.

AlphaSkills is often like that for us; it helps us uncover new levels of understanding or skills that need to be built, and I am so glad. For more information about the AlphaSkills Read with Sarah curriculum and our family, see the AlphaSkills Blog Introduction.