Lesson #3

The purpose of today's lesson was to see if the student was making any improvements in his fluency.  While the student's lack of fluency doesn't affect his comprehension, it is the cause of discrepancy between him and his peers.  I really feel that if the student were able to read with better fluency, he could be back on grade level with his reading.

Running Record
The main thing we did in our lesson today was a running record.  The student read a level K book with 95% accuracy and a self correction rate of 1:5.  In the past, he has always done a lot better with self corrections, so I have to wonder if the level K books contain some words that he is unfamiliar with.  As was the case with the last running record I conducted with this student, he used his visual cues the most.  This is interesting to me because the student does a great job of reading for meaning.  However, when he comes to a word he doesn't know, he forgets about the meaning cue system completely!  What is even more interesting is that the student is still able to tell me everything that took place in the story.  His missed words don't affect his ability to comprehend what he reads.  Every question I asked the student about what happened in the story was answered correctly. 

One thing the student is still really struggling with is motivation.  In order to get him to read today, we had to take turns reading every other page.  I would read a page, then he would read a page.  This was okay with me because he was still reading, but I want him to get to the point where he will read a book all on his own.

Dolch List
Today, we also read through Dolch list number 9.  The student read this list with 85% accuracy.  I would have liked for the student to continue reading through the lists, but he was unwilling to do so.  The reason I thought we should read through these lists is because maybe part of the reason the student's fluency is suffering is because he doesn't know all of the high frequency words.  After working on the Dolch list, I believe this could very well be the case.

Below is a photo of some of the words in the Dolch list the student read through:

What I Learned
This lesson taught me that while it is important for students to read fluently, they might still be able to comprehend what is being read.  I know this isn't the case very often, but it's important to keep this in mind as I work with future students.  This will help me to better understand that even if two different students both struggle with the same issue, they might not need the same type of instruction.