Reading Wow!!!

Today I finished testing the students to find their end of the year reading level. I'm very happy to report that the gains 2Ha students have made in reading are incredible. Our class as a whole has gone up 205 levels in reading this year. While this number is impressive to me, it is the students' actions in reading that impress me more. At the beginning of 2nd grade half of the students looked at me blankly when I asked them to retell what they had just read and the other half gave a half hearted attempt at hitting a few highlights from the passage they just read. Now they can all hit the major highlights and most of them splash their retellings with vivid descriptions from the passages they just read. At the beginning of the year, my second graders read mostly in monotone voices reading one word after the other with little comprehension of why the writer had used any kind of punctuation what so ever. Now, I hear the expression in their voices as they read ahead in their mind to determine how they think the author might have wanted that sentence to sound. Yes, 200 levels total is an incredible acheivement for any class of 2nd graders but I'm much more proud of the confindence that rings through their voices as they read any book that they set their mind on reading!!