Thinking About Getting Started, Instructionally
12 02 2008It appearrs that many of you are apprehensive about where to go instructionally, once you have done the Flint or some other assessments. Once you have made the summary from the Flint, think about what will help “Will” the most to move toward fluent reading on his grade level. What will help him move toward his grade level? What seems to be the biggest problem holding him back? Look at the “Road Map to see where “Will” has left the optimal reading development path.
Once you have thought about all that, it should become rather clear to you which areas of skills you might spend most of yours and his energy. Remember that you can’t fix it all in 15 hours. Also remember that you don’t want to just focus on one skill area to the exclusion of everything else. Try to make your instruction well rounded–that’s why you have texts on all five of the NRP’s reccomendations–the FAB FIVE.
This will be the Blog topic for the week that we will not meet. I won’t say good luck for I don’t think you need luck. You all have skills, as evidenced by your talk in class. Go use them, then reflect on them here.
I was pretty apprehensive about where to go after I finish the Flynt-Cooter, but after last class, I feel much more confident. I’m not sure yet what area Sam and I will be working on because we haven’t finished the Flynt-Cooter (and he’s on vacation all this week!), but I know now that I can turn to the Road Map and the Pearson books for ideas when the time comes. I also like that we have this blog as a means to sharing ideas (what works/doesn’t work)…so please, post your successes/failures on here so that we can all help each other!
I was also pretty nervous at first when getting started. When meeting with my student, I would start with an assessment piece and then always ended up reading a book with her that I knew that she would enjoy and finish up with a fun activity. This fun activity includes drawing and writing which can also be used as a sample for her comprehension and writing skills. As we all know writing and reading go hand in hand. I bring her different mediums to make it more fun for her also. Completing activities such as these with Abbey I have come to find that she has great skills in all areas except vocabulary. She just needs to broaden her vocabulary and she will be off and running:)
Oh, I also want to add that during one of our sessions, I brought one of my favorites: One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish by Dr. Suess. While I read the title, my student read along with me until we got to the color words. Therefore I realized that she didn’t know her color words. The next time I met with her we played a matching game with color words. I wrote the color words in its color on index cards. I made sure that there were two of each color. I placed them all on the table explaining to my student that you can only pick two up during your turn. If it’s a match you get to keep the match and continue to pick two more cards. The only thing is that you must say the color when you pick the card. Here she had fun while learning color words. She even said to me that she noticed that the word was written in its color.
It’s really hard for me to judge how I will feel about approaching instruction with my student (we’ll call her D for now) because of our lack of contact. I’ve been given a lot of mixed information about D’s current levels of reading and comprehension, so I look forward to completing the inventories. It will be much easier for me to plan our time together when I know what she needs help with the most.
Although I find the Flynt-Cooter Reading Inventory helpful as far as diagnostics are concerned, I think I expected the assessment portion to be blocked out more clearly. That’s not to say I’m uncomfortable with leading instruction with my student. I guess I assumed that once I found out my student had problem A, I would go and complete lessons 1, 4, and 7 in order to resolve that problem, and then I could model new lessons after ones that were given to me. That might not make sense to anyone else, but the instruction portion is far more open-ended than I expected. Having had enough classroom experience, maybe the open-ended aspect of this will work out better for me.
Tiffanny et. al.
The instruction pieces can be found in the Rasinki texts. Once you have idenitfied the need, start in those texts for lessons that will ameilorate the problems. Another place to look for lessons is the Web. Readwritethink.org is a site of lessons developed by teachers and categorized in every helpful way you can think of. I’ll show you in class, did I already? I’ll do it again, now that it will make more sense.
Another place for lessons is this blog. Look at the lesson Christine did with Abbey on teaching sight words. Notice how she scaffolded the words for the child in the beginning by using color to write the words. The next step will be to give the child more independence by taking away the color. And so on.
I haven’t started the Flynt-Cooter Reading Inventory yet because this past week was vacation. I am hoping to start it Monday or Tuesday and this will give me a better idea of what kind of reader Chris is. I was a little concerned in the beginning of the semester with what types of instruction I should use once I determined the level Chris is at, but after reading the Road Map and talking about the different Rasinki texts I am confident that I will be able to find some good strategies. Chris has not given up on reading yet and I hope my instruction will give him the confidence to continue reading!
I was just looking through the readwritethink.org website- it’s great! I spent quite some time looking through the different lesson plans and getting a better feel on how different lessons and skills correspond to the three levels of reading (learning language, learning about language and learning through language). In looking through one of the lessons I thought would be helpful for Kalleigh, I came across another good website: readingquest.org. It says it’s a website for social studies learning, but it has a bunch of great strategies and printables (and what teacher doesn’t like printables) that can be applied to any reading or language arts lesson. I am excited to start using some of these strategies from these websites with Kalleigh, as I will probably even use them with all of my students with special needs.
After meeting with Tyler, I was able to get a go sense of his reading ability and his interests. I performed the Interview/Attitude Interview, and the the different reading assessments from the Flynt/Cooter book. I was able to meet three times with Tyler over our break. We were able to really accomplish a lot. He is a very interesting kid that truly loves to read and learn. Tyler likes mystery books and enjoys comics. There is a book called, “City of Sparks” that he is really interested in reading. I am planning on getting that bok so we can read it to eachother during the course of our 15 hours. He is actually very interested in working with me, so he says and is looking forward to helping me and learning more fromthis experience. He is a very well rounded student and I am excited about working more with him. I truly feel that he is going to teach me a lot as well as me teaching him. Next time we meet, we are going to be setting up what he feels he would like to do during our session.
I have met with Matt twice. I have done the interest inventory with him thus far. Today I sent home paperwork for mom to fill out. I am hoping to get back the parent survey from mom tomorrow. Today we read an ABC book. He thought it was pretty cool. I was hoping he wouldn’t think it was childish. He didn’t. I was suprised that he struggled so much with the words. I have noticed that he would look at the first few letters then guess at the word.
After reading the ABC book we played on freerice.com. He thought it was pretty cool and then after a little while he was guessing because he was board with it.
I think that I will start assessments with him later in the week.
Emily and I have met twice so far. I began the Flynt/Cooter inventory with her. It seems pretty neat to see the relationship between the motivation to read and all the distractions that kids have around them. With cell phones, video games, televisions, and computers, children find little time to pleasure read. I am going to finish the survey with her next time we meet this week.
We answered the questions and I had her write the story for the wordless book. It is good to see how she writes a story. Emily definitely needs help with story elements and even dialogue. She tends to describe the pictures rather than write a story around it. I’ll be interested to see how she does on a retelling. I did a very informal retelling with her, but we need to find a better place to study because of the distractions we are faced with.
Logan and I were able to meet several times last week. During this time I took the opprotunity to get a sense of where he falls academically. We were able to go over several of the sight words that he is supposed to know at grade level (2nd grade). The words that he had difficulty with I put them onto indivdual cards with a D ring so that he could study them at his liesure. We will also be focusing on phonetics during our time together. Logan also seems to have a creative way of spelling so I am going to be figuring out the reasoning behind this.
We have not had a chance to get to the Flynt running record to establish the reading level that he is currently at. Though I have previously worked with him I am curious to see how far he has come within the last 6 months.
Although I work with my student Zack everyday in various small group settings, I haven’t had a chance to meet with him individually (other than to read to him during DEAR time) to administer the reading inventories, etc. I’m really looking forward to doing so b/c I don’t know where he “fell off the reading map.” Also, I’m unsure how to best help him approach grade level in reading and writing. At this time, the classroom teacher and I are striving to get him at the end of the first grade level by the end of second grade. He is classified with a learning disability in reading and writing (he receives services for these two subjects as well as math). I had a chance to look at the readwritethink.org website which looks like a great source of info. Hopefully by the end of this week I’ll have completed the inventories and summarized the info so that I can determine my course of action for Zack.
I am glad that I have finally been able to meet with my student so that I can answer some of these blog. Alexandera and I have met a few times and she is very excited to be helping me with my “homework. ” After using Flynt it was very evident to me that she needs help with reading comprehension and fluency. I have been working with her on comprehension by using sentences starters to cue her as to what the story was about.
I felt pretty sure of what I needed to work with Savanna on. Based on the assessments, her numbers were low in fluency rate, and she verbally told me she would like to “make it sound like I’m talking”. Her sight word recognition was apparently low when I completed her miscue analysis grid. It was pretty clear to me that these are the things I needed to work on, and that these were the things that Savanna wanted to work on with me. She is very aware of her weaknesses and eager to fix them. I have made goals to work on these area, capitalizing on her strengths.
I think I responded to this topic when it was posted but since my post isn’t up there I will try to recreate what I may have written….
The Flynt gave me a good indication that Jessica could fluently read all the words but seemed to have troubles when it came to comprehension. She would be retelling and totally miss the main problem of the story. After determining comprehension, with a little vocabulary and fluency, was her weak point my instruction focused on that. I decided to do a lot of reading different texts with Jess and then talking about what she thought and what the main points of the text was. I think next I will use a story map and directly instruct her to find the important parts of a story.