Reading like a Detective and Writing like a Reporter is TOUGH!
As teachers begin to facilitate our first few weekly and unit assessments don’t be alarmed if you children’s assessment scores are not quite as high as they were on last year’s reading tests. As I have shared in the past, our new curriculum brings with it some higher expectations for students and also some shifts in the way that they are asked to dissect and comprehend text. We now ask students to read far more non-fiction and rigorous text and to also provide text-based answers, based on evidence from within the reading. We ask students to write from sources, like many professionals do within the working world, we are also asking them to constantly utilize increased levels of academic vocabulary. With a little more practice, our student' reading test scores will most certainly improve and while our expectations are indeed higher, we do feel that we as educators and students alike will soon feel a sense of pride as we surpass these increased expectations and move to greater levels of college and career readiness.