Reading Groups & Leveling

Happy Friday! I'm so glad the day and week are over! This week has been insane with the CRCT-M going on. Today I tested a group (math), and we had to stop between sections and eat lunch before going on to the second section. Needless to say most of my day was spent testing...and it had to be read aloud on top of it!

This week for our Friend or Foe topic, I want to talk about reading groups and reading levels. Do you do guided reading, literature circles, something else, or maybe a mixture? How do you feel about groups and leveling?

There are so many methods to "level" our kids, what method do you prefer? Or does your school/district have a required method? How do you feel about these methods? Our district uses STAR Reading to determine a students level. Some schools in the district use Read with Sarah. The schools do use GRASP along with STAR, but only once a 9 week period. STAR is done monthly. I think that progress monitoring our students is very important, but I think we need more to go on.

Let's just take our son for example...he is in first grade and despises the STAR test. Until recently, the AR tests have been read to the first grade students. STAR they have to do completely on their own. It times them and if they spend too long on one question the timer starts flashing and then it moves to the next question. The timer makes him a little anxious...Well he has been getting a score grade equivalent to 0.6-0.8 (Kindergarten) most of the year and recently got a 1.4 on it. However, he actually reads much higher than this and comprehends even higher. We read Percy Jackson (4th grade) books at bed time. For a while his teacher kept him in the lowest reading group in the class. When he would say "this book is so easy" she would tell him he needed to work harder on STAR so she could put him in group with a harder book. I feel like if we place students like this when we know they perform higher we are doing them an injustice. I'm not just saying this because it's my kid, there are several students in the same class and other classes in the school that are being done similarly. What do you think?

~Steph