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Knowledge and Skills Statement

Response skills: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking using multiple texts. The student responds to an increasingly challenging variety of sources that are read, heard, or viewed.

Observe student responses in a whole-group, small-group, or individual setting. Track student understanding and progress through anecdotal notes or a checklist.

Example:

After reading an informational text about the sun to the class ask What is the sun? If a student responds a star, the teacher can say How do you know? The student would then be able to respond: I know because the story tells us right here that the sun is a star. The goal of this SE is to get students to go back to the text and find evidence to support their thinking as a strategy for increasing comprehension.

Notes:

  • When students respond to a text or a question about the text, a teacher can prompt the student to cite evidence by asking How did you decide that? or How do you know?
  • Students in kindergarten will most likely point to illustrations in the text or recall a part of what they heard to support their responses.
In kindergarten, eliciting appropriate responses may require asking the students to point to the part in the text that supports a response, paraphrase the part in the text that supports the response, or asking a student to name the page number that supports the response.
Students are expected to use information taken directly from texts to justify their responses. It is important that students understand that their responses must be based on actual ideas presented in a reading piece and not on their personal opinions about the topic being discussed. In kindergarten, text evidence may involve a student pointing to the part of the text that reinforces a response, or it may be paraphrasing a part in the story that supports their thinking.