Blog #7

I choose to do a running record on two students; Rain and Juan.  I have only used running records a few times, so this was a good learning process for me. 

The first student I worked with is a 5^th grade student, who has been in the US for 6 years, but speaks Arabic at home with his family fluently.  His family is also fluent in English, but they “try” not to use anything but Arabic when at home talking to one another.  Rain read “The Champion,” which is a grade 5 leveled D reader.  While Rain read, I counted 21 errors.  Rain is not a fluent reader and missed many sight words such as “what,” “from,” and “where.” Rain did use visual cues frequently.  He had phonemic awareness.   Rain would look at the beginning sounds of words, but then guess on the word and move on without worrying about whether the sentence made sense.  Also, he did not display any use of picture clues. The last thing I noticed was a few times he left out the articles “the” and “a.”   Some strategies to use with Rain could be teacher modeling of how to self-monitor when reading to see if the words make sense.  After modeling, Rain needs practice reading aloud and continuing to learn how to self-monitor. Some other strategies would be previewing text, front loading vocabulary, using visuals with written words, taking a picture walk, and focusing on high frequency words such as what, from, and where. This can be done with flash cards.  Rain really needs to read familiar text daily to help with fluency.  An idea would be to have Rain read a lower level text for a week.  Each day, Rain should increase his words per minute and be exposed to the same sigh words throughout the week with the book. 

The second student is a Spanish Speaker, but has been in the United States for 2 years.  He is also a 5^th grader, and like Rain, only speaks Spanish at home.  Juan read “The Magnifying Glass,” which is a Level H book. As Juan read, I counted 11 errors.  I noted Juan had a little more fluency than Rain, and he did not miss common sight words.  He did stumble over words such as pickup (puckup), heavy (have), everything (everyting) and so on.  He had trouble with the longer words and seemed to also guess the words without looking at the entire word or trying to sound it out.  Juan had several visual errors as he substituted other words for what was written (wouldn’t-would, walking-walk-n.).  However, I find students substitute words in my class often.  Juan also frequently substituted the /h/ sound for the /j/ in the word joking and jewelry.  Knowing that this is the pronunciation in his first language is important to help him identify the differences between languages and become more aware of his pronunciations. I would make sure and use visuals to introduce such words as pickup truck, magnifying glass, etc.  A picture walk is also a good idea.  I would also suggest using repeated readings with the same story at an independent level.   I would also continue to work on practicing the English pronunciations for /j/ while reading.

Both of these students would benefit from daily oral language with the teacher and their peers.  Since they are not speaking English at home, this is the only time they are hearing themselves and others speaking English.  Also, students need to read in small groups, independently, and with the teacher daily.  Sight words should also be used each day through fun activities.  Explicit instruction and think-alouds are also a great way to help comprehension.  These skills will help all students in the classroom.