Lehua's Chapter 6 Response

In this chapter, Taberski talks a lot about the "so what?" part of reading and running records. Instead of just having the student read, we need to make sure that they are COMPREHENDING the story because that is the most important thing. As I was finishing up my running records, I felt that they were incomplete in a way. I mean, in Kindergarten, the books aren't really "stories." They will say, "This is Sam. This is Tam. Tam sat on sam." If I were to ask them to retell the story, they can't because 1)There wasn't a "story" to retell, other than WHO the characters were, and 2) they are spending so much time trying to sound out almost every word that they can't comprehend what is happening in the book.

So far, the students have read to me about four different books. One was about "Dad," and what he is doing, another was about a dinosaur and the parts of his body, and the others were just simple one-to-one matching books. It is hard to tell at this level if they really do understand the book when they are the only ones reading it. On the other hand, if they are READ a book, then they can retell the story. I think that's the place that we should focus on retelling for the kindergarteners, and maybe the 1st graders in the beginning of the year.