Blog #7

            For the running records, I noticed that both students, Amani and Wendy, had a lot of meaning errors.  Both students are in Fifth grade, and each had some difficulty reading their book.

Amani read “Come and Play” and repeated a lot of the words that he was reading.  He had some pronunciation errors which is primarily due to English not being his first language.  A lot of his errors were related to meaning because he was really focusing on reading visually.  While reading “my doll and I are teachers”, he actually read “my doll, my doll and I are, a, are tee/tee-ches”.  This sentence does not make sense at all and he did not notice that the sentence did not make sense and did not try to correct it.

                Next teaching points for Amani are to frontload him with vocabulary before he reads a book.  This will help him understand words he may not have previously known such as firefighters and firehouse.  Another teaching point is to have Amani do a picture walk of the book before he reads it.  While he was reading he did not look at the pictures at all, and he might have been able to pronounce airplane had he seen the picture.  Another teaching point is to provide a book with high frequency words that include his sight words.  The last teaching point that I suggest is to find books that are interesting for the student; the book about a doll did not seem interesting for Amani.

                Wendy read at an instructional level of 90-94% accuracy which was wonderful to see.  She struggled reading a few words that she probably had not encountered before.  She struggled with past tense; for example, she read marked as markded.  She grouped words together in a different way which made it difficult to understand her while she read aloud. 

                Next teaching points for her would be to work with tenses to help her understand how they are used.  I would also work with fluency by reading fluency passages together where the teacher and student swoop the words.  I would sit with the student and do it together to ensure that she is comfortable with the concept.  Another teaching point would be to frontload her with important words from the text.  Diary and huge yard sale are words that are extremely important to the understanding of the book.  To help her with this I would practice diary writing for a week so that she understands what it looks like to write in a diary.  When working with the diary assignments, I would teach letter activities such as practicing the ending to a letter.  The final teaching point that I would work on with her is how to read money amounts because this is an area where she was unsure.