conference with Donte

And then...there was a lot of snow and all after school activities were canceled. So no comic book club to report of this week. But I did have a really interesting conference with Donte today during guided reading.

We were reading a non-fiction text about insects. Here is the excerpt of the text Donte was reading when we had the conference:

"Insects live everywhere. There are insects, like flies and cockroaches, in houses."

Donte: What are houses?
Me: (confused) Houses are where you live. Insects live there too.
Donte: (rereads page) Oh!
Me: What?
Donte: I forgot this was about insects.
Me: What do you mean?
Donte: I knew it was houses but I forgot it was where they live.
Me: I'm sorry, I still don't understand.
Donte: I thought they were talking about what type of insects.
Me: So did you think houses was a type of insect?
Donte: (nods)

What struck me about this conference was why constantly writing about what he reads (remember the infinite post-its?) might be such a critical strategy for Donte. I'm still not completely sure that my explanation of what was confusing him was the actual issue, or if Donte just nodded to nod. But what is clear is that keeping topics straight in his head can be challenging for him. Also, the sentence structure of that excerpt is weird, with the clause in the middle of the sentence like that. So he might also get tripped up by new sentence structures.