observations about kayla and jaymon's progress

Kayla and Jaymon are the other two members of the lowest guided reading group (Donte and Deavion are the other 2 members), and I have noticed some things about their reading in the last month that reflects improvement. As mentioned in the previous post, Kayla is autonomously generating questions about her book (her partner readers may have helped facilitate/model this process), and is looking for the answers as she reads. She's tracking questions as she reads! Another example of this came about when I conferred with her. She said: "I got this question I keeping thinking about. Why does she keep getting mad?". I think this question shows that she's thinking deeply about the character that she's reading: she's noticing a character trait, and noticing it consistently across many scenes in the book, AND most importantly, she's looking for reasons/clues why she is this way. She is analyzing. Jaymon actually researched Martin Luther King Jr. at home, and told me on the following morning about some of the facts that he'd learned. During independent reading, he's reading much more cognitively and intensely. He's observing things in the text that weren't even on his radar at the beginning of the year. For example, as he was reading "Martin's Big Words" he noticed that MLK's words were given a special font and print, and he thought about why the author did this (author's craft). Also, he volunteered his favorite part of the story about how MLK chose a nonviolent approach for the Civil Rights Movement.