When assessing kids for fluency it's important to have a cold reading at grade
level, listen carefully to their intonnation, and pace, and understand you must
stop if the child makes five errors in a row. Then you have to take the data
you get and use it to influence your instruction for that particular child.
This how you use the fluency assessment to help the child improve. It does take
a lot of time, but by doing it weekly you may see a pattern develop, and be
able to address it quickly.
For helping kids that are below grade level, your progress monitoring should
be at their grade level, but I'd follow up with on grade level materials at
least three times during the year so you can see what kind of progress they are
making toward this goal.
You should ask your literacy coach to help you determine what direction to go
based on your student's performance. I'd use data from more than one
assessment, such as fluency data combined with running record data. Are
specific types of words hanging up the student? Are they pausing too long at
particular parts, and speeding up at others? Is the reading selection about a
topic the child has little or no experience with?
I'd also talk to the student about what they see as the most difficult part
of reading for them. This is how I discovered that one student of mine needed a
colored overlay. Our EC department helped with that, and we saw dramatic
improvement. To him, the words on a white page seemed to have water flowing
over them, and a transparent piece of colored acetate stopped it!
Beware the word callers. I had a boy in second grade who could read ANYTHING
I gave him at 120+ words per minute! But you could tell by listening to him
that he didn't understand a word of it. His words were flat and disconnected.
His pace was like a robot, but man was he FAST! Both his parents and I worked
with him for two years to get him to slow down and savor the words. By
monitoring his progress weekly, adjusting his instruction based on his
progress, doing running records monthly, and assessing him on grade level three
times a year, we finally got him back on track! Some of the things we did were
reading about topics he was familiar with or had an interest in, choral
reading, echo reading, reading poetry, reading magazine and newspaper articles
Joy/NC/4
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
How children learn is as important as what they learn: process and content go
hand in hand. http://www.responsiveclassroom.org
---------------------------------
Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail beta.
_______________________________________________
Mosaic mailing list
[email protected]
To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to
http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org.
Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
