Running Record

When conducting the running record for this week, I used the Independent Oral Reading test that I give my students every Friday. I have a training at the board office tomorrow so I gave my test a day early, but the students have been practicing these sentences for two weeks now. I give the students a list of ten sentences that have common letter sound patterns in them. I test them on four one week then four the next week then we move onto new sentences for the next two weeks. I look for several things when testing the students. I look for how fluent of a reader they are, do they have to sound out the words, do they know the sounds that the letters make in the words, are they memorizing the sentences, do they self correct when a word doesn't make sense, and do they comprehend what they are reading.

Boy 1 is my most struggling reader. He has trouble identifying all of his letters which causes him to not know all of the letter sounds which causes him to struggle when reading. He can be a little inconsistent when reading. Some days he might know a word, the next day he might not. Even when sounding out some of the words correctly, he could not blend them to put the word together. He thought "sad" was pronounced /s/ /e/ /d/ which he thought was the word "seed". He also thought "cap" was pronounced /k/ /i/ /d/ which he said was "kid". He is very visual and oral so he does not remember all of his sight words, but the ones he does know he can point out every time. He also tried making sense of one of the sentences by saying "a little boy", but I told him to look at the sentence one more time because I knew he would know the word so the second time around he corrected himself because the sentence really said "a little cat". Towards the end of the assessment I knew he was getting a little frustrated so I just let him tell me what he thought the words were without having him sound them out. If I thought he might be able to sound it out, I asked him to, but overall he scored a 9/23 on the assessment which is a 39%. If I scored this correctly according to the running record, it says that the assessment was too hard, which I can obviously see that it is. Some things that I try with him are to put him on the computer using the starfall program because he can watch videos about the letter and click on the words for them to be read to him. He enjoys the computer station very much so I make sure to put him on it first thing. I use flash cards with him to try to build his memory on letters and sight words. After parent/teacher conferences, I decided that I'm going to try letting him use the LeapFrog Leap pads that were left in my classroom to see if those might help with word recognition.

Boy 2 seemed to be on level at the beginning of the year, but after a mistake that I made I realized that he was struggling a bit. The sentences that another Kindergarten teacher and I sent home did not match the sentences that we used for the Independent Oral Reading test, but we decided to give the test anyway because this would truly test the students on whether they could sound out or recognize the words without being in their memorized sentences. This is when I found out that Boy 2 was memorizing the words. He knows all of his letter sounds, but he was struggling with blending them together to make a word. During this test, he saw the word "cot" and thought it was "cat". I asked him to take another look at the word, and he sounded it out but could not figure out what the word was. In the next sentence, they used the word "cat" which he knows but after I corrected him the last time, he decided that he was unsure of what the word was. We tried a blending activity, and I showed him how to sound out the word by patting his arm and stretching the sounds together. He successfully used this strategy twice during the reading. He scored a 21/23 on this assessment which is a 91%. Even though he does well on this, I know it is because he is practicing the sentences at home and can memorize the words. If he has to sound out a word, he can't always blend the word together. According to the scores of a running record, this is a challenging instructional test which I can agree with for this student. Even though he recognizes almost all of the words, I'm not sure he could go back and quickly read the sentence or tell me what the sentence was talking about. When he sounded out a word correctly, I asked him what he just said and he couldn't tell me so I think there is a little comprehension trouble following his inability to blend words together.

Girl scored an 82% on the Independent Oral Reading test. She has to sound out most of her words, but she can blend them together. She doesn't know all of her letters or correct letter sounds so I notice that when she reads sometimes. I think she memorizes the sentences a lot of the time because when she was reading the last sentences during the test, her finger was not keeping up with the correct words as she read it. Also when she read the sentence "You are a little cat." by reading each word individually, she reread it to me as "That is a little cat." I think she is progressing from the beginning of the year, but I still monitor her because I still think she is struggling a bit. This text tested as too hard for her from what I concluded from the article. I do not know if I necessarily agree with that. I think it is challenging, but I wouldn't say too hard.