Fourth Graders Reflecting on their Reading Growth

One of the grade 4 reading units is Following Characters into Meaning.  Students work with their book clubs to study characters to increase their understanding of what they read.  Bart Fabian, one of the grade 4 teachers, has his students use the SoundCloud app to record their book club discussions.  This makes it easier to reflect on their learning at the end of the unit. It also allows Bart to listen in to more of the discussions.  Here is an example of one of their discussions.



Now that the unit is over, Bart gave his students the challenging task of reflecting on their learning in a blog post.  To provide structure, he had them use this planning sheet.

This was a challenging activity. Having the SoundCloud recording to refer back to made it easier for students to reflect and find specific examples.  Even with that support, after 45 minutes most students had only embedded one of their Soundcloud recordings and started to write their reflections.

Here are a few unedited examples of their posts in progress. Click on them for a larger image.