Reading Comprehension Grades Third to Fifth from Peekaboo’s Studio.

Week of February 1^st- February 5^th

During Daily Five and guided reading this week, I implemented the app titled Reading Comprehension Grades Third to Fifth from Peekaboo’s Studio. On this free version of the app, it has six fiction and six non-fiction stories that students can choose to read and answer questions about the passage. I thought this would be a good app to implement and see how my students were doing with their reading comprehension skills.

I used this app during guided reading. The different guided reading groups chose one of the four fiction or nonfiction stories to read. They had to first read the passage to themselves. Then we would read the passage in a round robin fashion. Lastly, we would choral read the passage. The passages are short enough to be able to complete all of this in a short amount of time (which I loved). The students then had to answer the questions that correlated with the passage we read. This is how I integrated this app into my classroom.  

On Friday, I gave my students a survey to rate this app. Overall, this app was not really a success with my students. The students rated the app with an average score of 2.59 for question one which asked the students if they liked the app. They really did not seem to like this app. After I averaged the scores, I asked a few of them why they did not like the app and they responded with the fact that they thought it was super boring and not a lot of fun. It makes sense, especially when compared to last week’s app. When asking the students the second question, “Did this app make you want to read more?” eight students responded yes and fourteen responded no. After seeing that result, I knew that this app was going to receive low scores for the rest of the surveys. For the third question, the students gave the app a score of 2.36 for in increasing motivation, or should I say not motivating the students to read more at all. The fourth question asks the students if they think they are better readers because of this app. This question received an average score of 2.05, which bothered me because that means that they felt bad about themselves as readers because of this app. Lastly, the students responded with nine yeses and thirteen no’s for question five that asked if they would read from this app again. When looking at these results, I can see that this app was not successful with my students and one that I will not be using again with them.

There were a few positives that I really liked with this app. First, I loved how I could use this app for my classroom. Since there is such a large academic gap, I could use the different grade levels to help differentiate with my students. They could sit next to each other and read on the same app and they do not know which level they are each reading from. Another feature that was nice was that you can adjust font size to a larger text. This is nice for my students who have to track as they read. The best feature of this app is that it asks questions to check comprehension. Each passage asks twelve to thirteen questions that quizzes the students on their comprehension skills and vocabulary skills. A teacher can create student profiles for each child and the results of the quizzes can be sent directly to the teacher for each child. Also, it has both fiction and nonfiction texts for the students to read. This is a great addition to the app because starting in third grade, students really need to know and understand that you read fiction and nonfiction texts very differently. Lastly, if a child were to answer a question incorrectly, it highlight the sentence with the answer in it. This reminds the students that they should go back and reread if they are unsure of themselves.

For this app, I found a few more negatives or features that I did not like. First, the free version only has grade levels third to fifth. It also only has twelve books altogether for the students to pick from. This leaves only four passages depending on their grade level that they can read. I thought the passages were not very different from one another besides length. Longer texts, does not mean that they are for an upper grade level. I also thought that the differentiation between the different grade level passages were lacking in a few ways. The third grade texts were still very hard for some of my struggling readers and the fifth grade passages were still too easy for my higher readers. This app is aligned with Common Core State Standards, but does not tell you which standard which passage goes with. For a teacher, this is not really an ideal. My students and I also did not like that there were not many options. It gave them no choice when picking to read one of the text. Lastly, I think instead of giving the students the correct answer after they answer a question wrong, I think they should give students the option to find the correct answer. I love how it highlights where the answer could be found, but they should make it so the students could go back, reread the highlighted part, and answer the question correctly.

For next week, the change that I am going to make is to only use the reading app during guided reading instead of reading a book together too. I want to give them more time with the iPad and the app and see if this helps them to focus on the one text in front of them, instead of the two. For my struggling groups, this seemed to be much harder for them to bounce back between the two different texts. Hopefully, this will help my lower groups be able to concentrate more and do better with the next app!