Chapter Charts
For this approach to reading instruction, teachers blend explicit skill lessons with authentic reading and writing so students get both structure and independence.
What is balanced literacy?
This stage of the writing process is where writers choose a topic, consider purpose and genre, and spend about 70% of their time.
What is prewriting?
This assessment tool involves listening to students reread familiar books to see how well they recognize high-frequency words, decode new words, and use reading strategies.
What is a running record?
What key pieces of information should you look for first in a case study to determine a student’s reading strengths and areas of need?
Student’s accuracy rate, fluency, self-corrections, and the types of miscues they make.
Whether they’re using meaning (M), structure (S), or visual (V) cues.
See what they’re doing well and what strategies they’re missing.
(Six Traits +1)
This trait focuses on the writer’s personality, tone, and style shining through the piece.
What is Voice?
When analyzing a running record, teachers look at these four systems—meaning, structure, visual, and pragmatic—to understand how a student processes text.
What are the cueing systems?
This stage involves getting ideas down on paper in a messy first attempt, focusing on content rather than mechanics.
What is drafting?
After completing a running record, teachers often ask students to do this in order to check their comprehension of the text.
What is retelling the story?
After completing a running record in a case study, what types of targeted instructional strategies could you choose to support the student, based on their errors and self-corrections?
You could do strategy lessons on cross-checking M/S/V cues, rereading for fluency, using word parts, looking for chunks, or pausing to think about meaning.
Pick whatever matches the pattern you saw in their running record.
During writing workshop, teachers use these short, focused lessons to teach specific skills or strategies.
What are minilessons?
If a student’s reading sounds fluent but the words chosen don’t fit the meaning of the sentence, they are struggling with this langauge system.
What is the semantic system?
During this stage, writers reread their work after a few days, get feedback, and make changes such as adding, deleting, substituting, or rearranging ideas.
What is revising?
Running records help teachers determine this important measure of reading ability based on accuracy rates.
What is a student's reading level?
(independent, instructional, or frustration levels)
If a case study indicates a student reads independently at Level J but instructionally at Level K, how would this influence your guided reading group placement and text selection?
Place them in a group reading Level K, because that’s where they’ll grow with support.
Choose texts at that instructional level so they can stretch their skills but still have success with my guidance.
This four-step cycle includes planning, monitoring, evaluating, and reflecting on students’ writing.
What is the Instruction-Assessment Cycle
This learning theory says students learn best by making meaning for themselves through hands-on experiences.
What is constructivism?
This stage of the writing process requires students to step away from their draft to gain distance so they can better spot errors in capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and sentence structure.
What is editing?
When analyzing a running record, teachers look for these “sources of information” that the student uses or neglects while reading.
What are reading strategies or cueing systems?
If a student reads with 92% accuracy and relies heavily on visual cues (V) but rarely uses meaning (M), what text level would be appropriate for instruction, and why?
92% accuracy falls in the instructional range, so I’d teach at that level.
Since they’re depending on visual clues, I’d use this level to help them practice using meaning.
Check if their reading “makes sense,” not just “looks right.”
These three informal tools—taken during regular classroom activities—help teachers collect evidence of students’ reading behaviors each day.
What are anecdotal notes, conferences, and checklists?
In this stage of the reading process, students dig deeper by rereading parts of the text, analyzing vocabulary, asking questions, and examining the author’s craft.
What is Exploring?
This final stage of the writing process helps students feel like “real authors” as they create a polished product that may include titles, illustrations, text features, and sharing with an audience.
What is publishing?
This deeper level of running record analysis helps teachers identify patterns in students’ mistakes—such as substitutions, omissions, or self-corrections—to understand how they process text.
What is Error Analysis?
What can repeated substitutions that “make sense” but do not match the letters (ex: reading home for house) tell you about the cueing system the student is relying on?
What strategy instruction would you recommend?
Those types of errors show they’re using meaning (M) but not checking the visual (V) cues closely enough.
Work on cross-checking strategies—reminding them to ask, “Does it look right AND make sense?”
Model pointing under the word and using the first few letters to confirm.
Using a combination of digital tools, print texts, collaboration, and different forms of student expression is known as this assessment approach.
What is Multimodal assessment?