A: I feel like the best approaches for assessing the three components of fluency (accuracy, reading speed, and prosody) are running records, fluency checks, and informal reading inventories, There were on page 85 of the Tompkins reading and along side it there was the recommended grade level for each assessments. Running records help to calculate the percentage of words the student reads correctly and from this you can analyze any errors made. After the student reads out loud and the teacher makes marks on her copy of the story, you can identify if the material was too easy, to hard, or appropriate for the student. There are also ways for the teacher to categorize any mistakes the student made by asking specific questions listed on page 86. Although running records are the most useful, teachers can also use IRI’s. There are two parts to this test: graded word lists and passages. The students read the words until it is too difficult for the, which helps the teacher to figure out where the student should begin with the passage. After completing the passage the students need to answer questions. To test fluency, it is necessary to have the students read out loud. I believe the students’ word identification is more developed than from when I started, so it’s developing well. Each student has received word rings with specific sight words. They are tested on these sight words from week to week and when they can correctly identify each word they move up to the next color level. Majority of the students have increased a lot from the beginning of the school year and some have passed all of the sight words for 1st grade already. Some students still have trouble with things like short/long vowels, magic letters, or words that don’t follow the same patterns as others. As for fluency, many of the students have increased in that as well, but sometimes I think the students just have the books memorized because they have read them so many times. However, once my CT feels its time for them to move on to a higher level, they are once again challenged but I believe most of the students fluency has increased. Many students have a better word recognition now than they did at the beginning of the school year so they can get through reading more fluently. As for my focus student, she transferred to the school so I don’t know where she was at before she came to our class, but she is at an appropriate level for her age and seems to do well when not distracted.
B: My book, Number the Stars, is at too high of a level for my placement classroom. I think for this book, I would focus on comprehension. “Some comprehension strategies can be important to a reader because they have the potential to provide access to knowledge that is removed from personal experience (Stahl).” Although I don’t believe that this book will directly relate to the students, I think that some situations they are in could possibly trigger something that has happened in their life that was similar to something in the book.
I would read a chapter to the class each day, and then have the students create a story map about what happened. The story map was talked about in the Stahl reading and the students seemed to do well with this. I would also meet with the students individually and see if they could retell the story. It might be better to read a few chapters at a time to separate groups of students at different times of the day and have the complete the map and retell directly after instead of trying to assess the entire class at once. If I had an older group of kids (higher el) I would begin with guided practice, then have them create/use a story map to guide their learning and retell. I would also do reciprocal teaching, where students take turns leading discussion and asking questions. I would do this in small groups.
I think you did a great job describing the three components of fluency Taylor. I got the same information from the book that you did. The thing that was missing for me, and I didn’t really see much mention of it in your post, was a good way to assess prosody. You mentioned at the end that some of the students have read the book so many times that they have it memorized, but is that really prosody? I have a hard time believing that it is. It doesn’t show how they will read a new book at that level. I think the main reason that this is so hard to assess is that it is hard to give exact numbers to it. You can hear it when a student is reading, but administrators, politicians, etc. like hard numbers. You can’t assign a hard number to prosody.
ReplyDeleteIt’s good to hear more about what happens in the lower grades. I am missing some of that in my field placement. In addition, this is the second time I’ve had a fifth grade placement, so I didn’t see much, actually less, last year. My CT this year does spend most of the morning on language arts and uses much of that time allowing the students to work on their silent reading and endurance skills. Tompkins says that fifth graders should be reading for about 45 minutes at a time and they often get a chance to work on this skill. Although, most times it is usually in the 25-30 minutes range. During this time my CT pulls small groups of students out for mini group lessons.
There are about six children in my classroom that have been identified as students that need to be tracked to ensure they are progressing. One of the keys to this is administering more frequent running records with them. Last week my CT let me do this task to give me some practice and free her up for group lessons. I found the running record task to be interesting. I was supposed to give a very brief mini lesson on how to look at the beginning, middle, and end of what they read so that they could more easily comprehend it. I did this, but then the next running record was non fiction. I felt that the CT could have given me a more appropriate way to help them comprehend this genre. I ended up evolving that mini lesson to help them remember data. I found, though, that the lesson still didn’t help with comprehension. The selections in the assessment I used are pretty random in their reading level. This one was about plants, how they obtained their food, and photosynthesis. I’ll admit that even as a science major I wasn’t able to recall much of what they read. They also knew that they were reading for speed so some of them seemed to be concentrating more on that. I just think that the assessment is a good way to gather some data on students, but when the school is using it as an assessment of the teacher I see the flaws.
My book club book is The Watsons go to Birmingham. This shouldn’t be a hard book for the students in my class to read, but I could see where there might be some comprehension problems with it. It is set in a time that I couldn’t relate to, yes even with ten years on you guys. My lesson would work on giving them the background knowledge that they would need. I would use a chapter walk to do this. Starting with the first chapter we could discuss what it might have been like to live in 1963. I would have to remind/teach them about how black people were treated then. There are references in the first chapter about how there is good and bad about the North and the South at that time and we would have to discuss some of those differences. In my field placement many of the kids have very little knowledge of what it is like to live in a big city. Most of them have little knowledge of being poor. I realize this is too much for one lesson, so I would have to divide some of these bigger topics up into other chapters. These lesson would be best with the whole class where we would have a bigger pool of knowledge to share.
I was at my placement today and was surprised to see copies of the book I am reading for book club, The Watson's Go to Birmingham. My CT said it was such a great book and he was really excited to start it with the class. There is also an intern in my classroom, and she introduced book clubs already in there, so they are pretty good at intellectually discussing what is going on with the books they're reading. I am excited that I will get to participate with them on the discussions with this book, as well as see what topics they choose to discuss. This makes what we are doing in class directly applicable to the classroom, something that does not always get to happen.
ReplyDeleteI'm curious to see what parts of the book the worksheets cover and stress. I'm sure most of the questions will be on comprehension and checking to see if they are understanding what is going on in the plot of the story. It is not a difficult read, so most of the focus will be on the "moral of the story" type of thing. Since they are in fifth grade, they do not stumble with fluency or other reading issues (at least for this group of kids), so getting what the author wanted them to get out of the book is the biggest thing.
And to comment on the first part, I think you did a great job of explaining the main components as well, Taylor. Those are the biggest parts of fluency. Like Joel, I am also in a higher grade, so there are hardly any cases of students having trouble with fluency. There is only one student who leaves the classroom for extra help in reading, but that is mostly because he has other issues that affect his reading (I think he is dyslexic). Other than that, all the rest of the students are very proficient readers and writers.
ReplyDeleteLast year, I was in a second grade classroom and saw a lot more fluency problems. There were only a handfull of kids who could actually read more than four word clumps without stopping. Many of them would read a paragraph and then have no idea what they just read, and then they would have to read it all over again. Their fluency really affected their comprehension. I was in the class at the end of the school year, so I am not entirely sure what the teacher did to assess the students.
I was in a language arts resource room for a placement as well, and there was a lot of tracking and big elaborate plans made up for each child who was struggling. They were assessed very frequently and if there wasn't any progress, there was some protocol that was followed to figure out why there wasn't any progress. The school was very diverse and most of the students were in the resource room because English was their second language, so I'm not sure if that had anything to do with their strict (but nice) policy on progress.