Today Jackson was back in school after breaking his collarbone and I had the chance to work with him. He had broken his collarbone when playing football with his older brother and is now learning to write with the other hand. It's a bit of a struggle but he is managing. Despite never writing with his left hand before, he didn't seem to discouraged which was really important.
After seeing the improvement last week with Max and how the cold and hot read can have such an effect on a students fluency and confidence, I decided to do the same with Jackson as well. I wanted to show the two boys that rereading a passage may not be the most interesting thing to do, but it can definitley help our fluency and reading comprehension. If we take the take to go through every word we stumbled over and shrugged off, our vocabulary will grow and we will understand the content more. I want them to learn that this is any important resource the students can use at any point in the day that can help them farther on down the road when they're in highschool and college. It's a good method to use with their learning disability.
The first time that Jackson read the story and performed the cold read, Jackson read 46 words per minute. He struggled with the words Asia and live. Max struggled with the word Asia as well and this just shows me that the students haven't learned about the different continents yet so I talked to them about what continent we live on and how there are 6 other continents out there. It would have been really beneficial to the boys if I showed them on a map where Asia was and gave examples of other countries that are in Asia but there wasn't time for that. After we read through the passage together and I helped him through the words that he struggled with, Jackson read the passage again. He read 61 words per minute during in the hot read. He had problems with the word Asia again and since. Jackson's fluency has definitley increased since I first started working with him. His rate and expression has increased and now we just need to work on his accuracy. His confidence was also increased and I think it's making a difference. I told him that he made a huge improvement after reading the passage twice and I hope he continues to do that.