Option 1: Assess students’ understanding of key terms used in this activity with the Key Vocabulary: The Forest of S.T. Shrew student page. Refer to the Key Vocabulary: The Forest of S.T. Shrew teacher page for the correct responses.
Option 2: Use student drawings or flip-up pictures from the activity to assess their understanding of the main ideas presented in the story.
Option 3: Give each student a copy of the What’s the Connection? student page to complete. Use The Forest of S.T. Shrew Evaluation Rubric teacher page to assess student responses. Possible answers include:
Living things:
ant, bird, beetle, carrion beetle, caterpillar, centipede, earthworm, fly, fungi, grasshopper, grub, lichen, millipede, moss, nuthatch, orange fungus, pill bug, termite, salamander, shrew, spider, squirrel, wasp, white grub, wood roach
Non-living things:
air, dead animals, dead leaves, dirt, ground, log, soil
Ways living and non-living things are connected in the story:
- Earthworms, beetles, and other decomposers live in the ground.
- The decomposers eat the soil and decaying plant and animal matter.
- Carrion beetles eat animals that have died.
- Moss and fungi live on dead logs and snags.
- Wood roaches, termites, pill bugs, beetles, salamanders, and other organisms live inside logs, chewing and tunneling through the wood, helping to break down the log and turning it into soil.
- Nuthatches and other birds fly in the air.
- Nuthatches eat the insects found on the bark of trees.
Option 4: Using the A Forest Adventure with S.T. Shrew student page or one of the suggested texts listed in Additional Resources, have students perform a cloze reading assignment, using their knowledge and subject comprehension to fill in the blanks. Cloze reading is a test of comprehension that involves having students use their knowledge to supply words that have been systematically deleted from a text. You may delete specific content words for students to complete, such as:
“In here, it’s like a tiny ________,” Millie told her. “We have tons of workers who are busy, ________and night, breaking this log down into soil. All the nutrients in the wood are getting ________!” Everywhere they went there were things ________, tunneling, and burrowing through the wood. There were wood roaches, small white termites, and hard-shelled pillbugs that rolled into tight little ________for protection as she and Millie went by. There were also insect-eating ________: huge, shiny, black beetles with giant jaws, and centipedes with venomous ________. When they’d crawled deep inside the log, they saw a salamander resting in a dark damp hole.
Possible answers include (in the order they appear in the sample cloze passage): factory, day, recycled, chewing, balls, hunters, fangs.
