Monday, November 22, 2010

literacy

Literacy blog
During September experience I had the opportunity to watch running records being done with many different students before doing some on my own. When this was introduced in the literacy class I was excited to see what more I can learn about it. I wanted to know what teachers do with running records and what they can do with them. I am excited to watch students as they work through many different strategies to solve for unknown words.
When I finished my time in September, I was able to do a running record but did not have the ability to analyze them well. I also did not know about the strategies. From here on out I am going to watch for students to self-monitor, cross check, reread, confirm, locate known words, self-correct, search, and predict. I understand that there can be more strategies than these listed but I hope that knowing these things will help me better understand where the students’ needs to focus their attention on to help them become a good reader.
One thing that I find interesting is that there are so many ways to level books. At one school they might use AR levels but another school might use Fountas and Pinnell reading levels. I can’t help but wonder which one is better. I understand that it is important for a reader to have 90-94% accuracy while reading. But it seems to me that some students do have strong accuracy but can’t give a strong retell or even remember anything that they read. Find the just right book maybe more difficult that it appears. But it is important that readers are reading just right books so that they can improve on their reading skills.

1 comment:

  1. Tina,

    I envy that you already have familiarity with running records. It was a bit like a foreign language to me as I needed to keep remembering what symbols to use so I could go back and understand what I had written. The analysis is very logical but I know I need a lot more practice before I will get comfortable with this important literacy tool.

    I think the AR books are "handy" for getting an idea of the level of the book for our students. I know quite a few teachers who have little to no confidence in the tests. I have heard that kids can do well on the tests even if they are not that great at comprehension. I know that my daughter's middle school teacher requires a certain numbr of AR points every semester. I like at it as an encouragment to read and so I am all for that. She does not use the scores for anything, the system is just an easy way to check that students are doing the required reading.
    Susan

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