These reading rubrics for primary grades are great for kindergarten and first-grade reading! These assessments and scoring guides are great for guiding your lessons in reading comprehension. If you’ve used our Engaging Readers units then you probably already use the Rubrics that come with each unit, but questions about assessments are one of our most commonly asked questions so we will talk about that in this blog post.
Reading Rubrics for Primary Grades: Reading Comprehension
First, what are Engaging Readers? These units are read aloud units that would take the place of a basal. Each book includes detailed lesson plans that cover five days of instruction. Each day we cover a different comprehension skill and students listen to the text, or parts of the text, for that purpose. Listening to the same text multiple times is one of the primary scaffolds that are used during close reading. This allows students to dig deeper into the meaning and improves comprehension skills. (Therrian, 2004).
Reading Rubrics for Primary Grades: A Closer Look
Let’s take a look at the book, Piggie Pie! by Margie Palatini is one of my favorite books, mostly because of how my students have always reacted to it. It is one of those books that they beg to hear again and again. Here’s a quick summary of it. Gritch the Witch wants to make Piggie Pie, but she doesn’t have any piggies in her pantry. She goes to Old MacDonald’s farm, but there is just one problem, the pigs have outsmarted her, and they are all wearing a disguise.
After talking to the ducks, cows, chickens, and even Old MacDonald ( who is also piggies in disguise) the witch is beside herself. Then, the wolf comes out of hiding and tells her not to worry about the pigs because they are too tricky and can’t be caught. The wolf tells her that he’s been chasing the pigs for days and that he’s wasting away to practically nothing! You can see the rest of their exchange below.
Reading Rubrics for Primary Grades: Inferencing
This is the perfect place to stop and have students use the text clues along with their schema to infer about what is happening in the story. We posed the following question, Gritch says, “Why don’t you come home with me for lunch?” What do you think she means by that? Let’s take a look at some of the answers we got from some first-graders and score them using the rubric. Kindergarten teachers, don’t worry! We have some Kindergarten samples at the end of this post.
Student Sample A: I think that Gritch will eat the wolf because she was thinking about eating him. How would you score this response? I’ll save the analysis for the end. 🙂
Student Sample B: I think Gritch is going to eat spaghetti because they didn’t have any ingredients.
Student Sample C: I think that the wolf is going to eat Gritch because I think I saw some kind of bread on Gritch’s head.
Student Sample D: I think that the wolf was a piggie because all of the other animals were dressed up as another animal. So Gritch could eat the piggie pie for lunch.
I wanted to save the analysis for the end because I want you to think about how YOU would score each student and why you would score them that way. Rubrics are a powerful tool for reading comprehension. Especially when it isn’t a literal question with just one right answer. Rubrics provide clear expectations so that you can talk to students about their work. They are also an excellent way for parents to see how their child is doing with regard to the expectation.
You don’t need to have a question and answer test about a text at the end of the week because each day your students are interacting with the text and writing in response to reading. These written responses ARE THE ASSESSMENT! You can easily convert the 1, 2, 3, & 4-star score to a grade.
Reading Rubrics for Primary Grades: Scoring the Rubrics
Okay, friends let’s go back and look at each writing sample, and I’ll tell you how I scored it.
Sample A The student gave a meaningful inference with evidence. She noticed the thought bubble above Gritch’s head on the last page and that led her to conclude that Gritch is going to eat the wolf because she was thinking about eating him. I love the details in her illustration. Gritch is shoving the wolf in the oven, and the speech bubble says, Do not mess with me!
Sample B In this example the student was thinking about the fact that Gritch didn’t have the ingredients to make piggie pie, however, he missed the key detail that shows what Gritch was actually thinking. I love the dialogue between Gritch and the wolf. G: “This will be good.” W: Yep! Great details in the illustration and he did provide evidence for his thinking. However, I still gave him a 2 because that key detail was really important to the meaning of the story.
Sample C The student gave a meaningful inference with evidence. In this case, she noticed that the wolf was thinking about eating Gritch. During our conversation about her thinking, she told me that the wolf would be stronger because he has sharp teeth and claws. 4 stars
Sample D Oh, my goodness! I don’t know why but for some reason this one is my favorite! I love how this little sweetie was thinking about all of the things that were happening in the story. The ducks were piggies in disguise, the cows were piggies, the chickens were piggies, even Old MacDonald was piggies in disguise. Therefore, the wolf probably is too. In his illustration, you can see that Gritch is celebrating! Yes! Piggie Pie!! I gave this student a 4.
This is what the actual rubrics look like. The top is so that we can score their written response to the question and the is for them to self evaluate their writing to make sure that they have capitals, punctuation, spaces, etc. We have a rubric for all 15 of the comprehension strategies we cover throughout the year. They are included in our ENGAGING READERS UNITS, and they are also available SEPARATELY. Before I go I wanted to tell you that the Engaging Readers work for both Kindergarten and first-grade students. Here are a few samples of kindergarten work. This work was done in April.
I think she means come home with me because I want to eat you. (4 stars)
I think she means to eat the wolf’s leg for a sandwich. (4 stars) Bahaha! This one has me cracking up! Do you see the 3-legged wolf in the illustration?
Reading Rubrics for Primary Grades. These reading rubrics for primary grades are great for kindergarten and first-grade reading Assessments and scoring guides are great for guiding your lessons in reading comprehension. You can find all of these units and rubrics by clicking HERE.