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I found this document on a Florida website-it is a pdf document on the readibility of the fresh reads that come with the Scott Foresman Reading Street program. This gives you the readibility from Grade 2 through Grade 6. There is not too much difference between the low level, on level, and advanced. Check it out-very interesting!
I would have thought that the low level fresh reads should have been on about a 4th grade level(maybe even 3rd).
I REALLY want to use the fresh reads that go along with our weekly units in the Scott Foresman Reading Street 6th grade reading program.
Here are the drawbacks:
1. The fresh read passages themselves are pretty boring
2. I don’t have a lot of time in my schedule to plug them in
3. Some of them are hard to understand
4. The questions are HARD!
Here are the good things:
1. They are a great preparation for state testing because of the passage formats
2. I could easily use them to teach different strategies since they are short texts
3. I could use some of their questions, but also make up my own
Here is one plan that I have come up with-not sure if it is workable or beneficial, but I’m game for trying it out!! This would be if I used the fresh read every other week instead of weekly. I could use an “article” from a newspaper or magazine the 1st half of the week-then the fresh read for the 2nd half of the week.
Monday- High interest article-introduce reading strategy-read and practice reading strategy
Tuesday-High interest article-read again practicing reading strategy
Wednesday-Fresh read-read and practice reading strategy
Thursday-Fresh Read-read again practicing reading strategy
Friday-Assess using the fresh read and questions about fresh read
Anyway, this is just a thought! I’ll probably change my mind again over the summer! 🙂
I am sort of at a loss on how to best utilize the fresh reads with my 6th grade students. I would love to get other people’s suggestions! 🙂 I have tried a couple of different things:
1. Gave the students the fresh read as an assessment without reading it prior to that
2. I read it aloud to them while they followed along. Then I gave it to them as an assessment
3. I had them partner read it twice during the week. They used the “Say Something” strategy where one partner would
read a section, the other partner would “say something” about what was read and then they would swap. Then I gave
it to them as an assessment at the end of the week.
What was so disheartening was that there was not a huge difference between the grades no matter what way I did it.
If anyone has any suggestions please leave a comment! 🙂
