Today in The Learning Academy Tia and I were given to opportunity to work with the students while they worked on readnaturally.com. This website allows the students to perform cold reads, read alouds a certain amount of times, gives the students quiz questions on the reading and then has the children perform hot reads with the teacher. All of these activities then measure the students’ fluency and how many words they read per minute. Tia and I were in the computer lab with Ms. Swan helping the entire class with this and it was nice to work with a variety of students and see all of the different levels that they are at.
Today the other preservice teacher, Tia, taught a lesson on narrative stories and what made them a narrative story. She started off the lesson by asking the students what she thought was a narrative story and the elements that make them. Then she asked the students what they should was dialogue and she had a good class discussion going. She made sure to call on a variety of students throughout the lesson and she asked the class what makes a story a good story. At one point, she tried to come up with some examples for the students and wasn’t able to think of anything. Tia was nervous today and it was showing during her lesson. She then asked the students what if the story didn’t have an end and what are they supposed to do. Then Tia went on to giving each student a story telling card. What these cards are is a short story that starts off on the page and then after a couple of sentences, the story stopped. Tia had the students write the rest of the story by using a graphic organizer and just writing the story. I thought that the cards were very cute and a great way to help students start stories and work on being creative. They are definitely something I would like to have in my own classroom one day.
While Tia was presenting her lesson, I was grading math, OG and reading papers in the back of the room. I noticed when I graded Jackson’s reading paper called Seeing Stars he had gotten 3/14 questions wrong. One question that he had gotten wrong he had skipped over and another question that he had gotten wrong was due to writing the number 1 twice. He was supposed to order a series of events 1-4 and wrote the number 1 twice and skipped another number. This shows me that Jackson could do better and get better grades on his school work if he worked slowly and took the time to go back at the end of his work and check over everything. If he had done this he would have noticed that he skipped a question and wrote the answer twice. Then Jackson would have only gotten one problem wrong and had a higher score on the worksheet.
There wasn’t much talking between Ms. Swan and the students. It was a very productive class and there wasn’t much talking and spending time together. Ms. Swan did update the students on something that her dog, Oliver, did the other day and the students were excited about this. Tia and I gave each student a fluency check today and it was nice to be able to talk to more than one student. They also all read at different levels and it was interesting to see what each student had trouble with and where they excelled compared to how Jackson approaches things. The higher level reading students used DIBELS level 3 stories and the particular story that we read had the word immunizations and the 4 students that I tested at this level all struggled with this word.
Towards the end of the class I worked individually with Jackson. I decided to give Jackson a hot read on a story that he read the first week I tested him, as well as a cold read on a new short story. I wanted to see how he did on the old text compared to when I first assessed him. The very first day I gave him a running record, he was reading 44 words per minute. Today, he read the same passage as he did the first week and read 54 words per minute. This shows me that Jackson’s fluency is improving and he is becoming more comfortable reading and being expressive with the text. When Jackson read the new story, he read 56 words per minute. This is a large improvement compared to the first running record and fluency test that I gave Jackson 6 weeks ago.