Friday, April 04, 2008

Prediction Graphic Organizers--Homegrown and Otherwise!

Happy Tenth Birthday, Hannah!!! (Hannah's mom Sonya is the Charlotte Mason momma who's website first got me interested in RDI.)

Yesterday, I promised to share how we do predictions in a story. Before reading the next chapter of a book, we recall any dangling problems. We fill out a prediction graphic organizer like the one below. The video clip shows Pamela and I discussing the problem that came to light in Chapter 3 of Miracles on Maple Hill and filling out the sheet:




Chapter 4 held the answer to the problem, posted below in case you lost sleep over Marly's poor mice!


Sometimes, the problem occurs in the middle of the reading. If it is an over-arching problem, I hold off filling out the sheet until the next chapter because I can lead off the chapter with the unsolved problem. I also preview the chapter in the morning to figure out what graphic organizers to use. Today, I realized the first three pages of Chapter 5 had four separate little problems (more like daily annoyances). Pamela ended up filling out the following four organizers and we worked on sorting relevant versus irrelevant information.


For every story in the Reading Milestones primers, I have Pamela make a prediction for every single story in the book before she ever cracks the book open. She spends the first day of a new primer identifying potential problems and solutions for all six stories. I make up the graphic organizer show below in Excel. We read one story per day, and, at the end of a story, she records the actual problem and solution and assesses her prediction.

No comments: