What is a good teacher to do??

I ended my last blog with a charge for teachers to take the time to identify their students with reading difficulties. I'd like to share some ideas to help you follow through in helping these students become fluent and accurate readers.

Sadly, there are time constraints on teachers to effectively implement effective reading strategies for students to become successful readers in fluency, rate, and comprehension. So, in writing this, I do realize that most teachers will have to be incredibly creative and, at the same time, understand and value the importance of giving each of their struggling readers the opportunity to become successful readers.

First, listen to your students read aloud in order to make judgments about their progress in reading fluency. As you do this, consider the critical aspects of fluent reading: word-reading accuracy, rate, and prosody.

There are many different ways to measure a student's word-reading accuracy. Simply listening to oral reading and counting the number of errors per 100 words. Through careful examination of error patterns, you can decide which strategies the student is using and which they are failing to use. For example, how the student attempts to figure out an unknown word will give you an idea of their phonemic blending, a guess made based on context, or a combination of decoding and contextual analysis. SRA, DRA and Guided Reading programs are an excellent source of curriculm to aid in this instruction.

Assessing reading rate is best done through contextual reading rather than reading a list of words. measuring rate should include automaticity and reading speed in connected text. Timed reading of a student's reading of connected text allows young observe the number of words read correctly and the number of errors made in a given time frame. If you are the kind of teacher that is good at gathering info on your students, then you won't mind this next suggestion...record a baseline for each struggling student on their first timed reading. Set a goal with the student for the next reading. Timings should be done at least three times per week in order to build consistency. When the student levels of and is no longer increasing, it is time to select a new passage. You want to keep the student on the same passage until they level off in accuracy and rate. Keep the student engaged in doing their best each reading by having them set a goal for each reading.

Assessing prosody can be accomplished at the same time as rate and accuracy during the timed readings. Prosody is the student's inflection, expression and phrase boundaries. Comprehension improves as a student's prosody improves. Prosody usually is the last of the fluency elements to develop. But, as accuracy and rate develop at the independent level, you will begin to hear prosody emerge. Prosody will develop in the later repeated timed readings at the independent level. One element builds on another. When accuracy is addressed, rate improves, and the prosody. With all of this coming together for a struggling reader is such a success and confidence builder!! Reading comprehension automatically improves as these fluency elements come together.

Hope everyone has a great week of reading successes!