Today while in the classroom Tia and I gave our students another running record. Our lesson plans took up most of the regular class time that we were there but we had just enough time to perform the running records on all 3 of our students.
Jackson read the entire passage, which was 251 words, in 5 minutes and 30 seconds. He read 45 words in 1 minute. This was about the same from the week before, Jackson had read 44 minutes in 1 minute. He seemed to make less errors this time but he still isn't reading fluently. After listening to Jackson read to me the last couple of weeks, I've noticed that he has a problem with rate and expression. He doesn't stop and puase when the pauses are necessary - such as at punctuation when a period or question mark appears. This could be a problem because if he isn't stopping to let his brain register everything that he just read, he won't be able to comprehend and actually know what happened in the story.
The words that Jackson had problems figuring out what they were and how they were said, he tended to replace with words that were spelt similarly. For example, the word was thought and he said threw because they both started with -th. Towards the end of the passage, Jackson started omiting and adding in random sight words (had, made, my, etc.) that didn't benefit the passage at all. I believe this was because he was rushing to finish because his classmates were moving around him and the classroom had gotten quite. I'm afraid that a lot of his problems with reading stems from his fears and shyness of his friends hearing him read and seeing his work. Yes, there will always be something that is taught in school that we can work on but I can't teach him to not be self-conscious.
I enjoyed working with Max and Jackson because they seemed eager and actually had improved reading on their DIBELS assessments. I really believe that it was because of the lessons that Tia and I taught the class but it was nice to see that they were improving. They still have a lot to go on in order to have exceptional fluency and good reading comphrension but the running record gives us the data we need to start working towards that. The rest of the students had snack time while we were testing our students. I have noticed that Jackson is very shy but he seems more comfortable with me than he did at the beginning of the semester. I plan on giving him a running record assessment next week on Diary of a Whimpy Kid to show him that I paid attention to what he likes.