This is the first real week that I will be meeting individually with Kate and we will begin our conferences. Last week, the week of October 12th, I was sick and unable to go into the classroom so this week I had to do both the first running record and the reading inventory. Also, I e-mailed the letter to Kate's parents to her teacher so she could take it home before I worked with her today, which definitely helped! Here is the letter I sent to her parents (and all names in this document have, again, been changed):
I was very nervous going into the whole thing because I had never had any of these types of interactions with a student before. Not only that, but I still wasn't completely sure what I was doing and was afraid that shine through while I was trying to work with Kate.
When I talked to her teacher (I'll refer to her as Mrs. C), she told me I should have absolutely no problems with Kate, which alleviated some of my concerns. At first when I mentioned to Mrs. C that I would like to conference with Kate she asked me if I was supposed to be doing the audit trail with a struggling student or not, and when I said that was not a requirement she said that if that wasn't an issue that I would love working with her.
Mrs. C, Lizzie (my classmate sharing my field experience class), and I all discussed how Mrs. C goes about assessing what reading level all of her students are at, and it turns out their school actually uses a special program installed on Palm Pilot. All teachers in the school have it, and the teacher simply has the student read to them and they conduct a running record on the Palm Pilot. The program computes their final score and it is saved in the system. These scores tell the teachers what they need to spend more time on in class and what they should work on individually with the students. She told us that the students become so used to the assessment that they aren't anxious or uncomfortable with doing it.
Now on to the meeting! I began with the reading inventory and asked Kate about her experiences with and knowledge of reading. These are the questions and the answers she provided (you can click on the image to enlarge it):
It was great to know that she is an active reader at home, because that gives her a lot more opportunity to practice what she learns in her reading conferences.
After this, we then moved on to our first running record. In one of our readings for class, Serravallo and Goldberg explain how running records help the teacher establish "what levels students are able to read with high degrees of accuracy, fluency, and comprehension" and also helps the teacher "develop ideas about ways to work with students in conferences to figure out what skills and processes to reinforce and what to teach." (p. 37) These are both exactly what I hope to encounter in doing the running record with Kate so I can develop the best personalized conferences I can give her. Currently her leveled reading group is reading the book The Magic Tree House: Dark Day in the Deep Sea by Mary Pope Osborne, so I just had her read from the last spot she stopped at in the book.
There were very few miscues in her reading and I was highly impressed overall with her proficiency for her age. This is the running record:
After she finished reading the section, the first question I asked was what happened in the part that she read. This was just to help me feel out how developed her comprehension is, and I was surprised when she said she could not remember what she had read.I had her look back at the text she just read and try to pull out some of what seemed to be the key points, and she said, "They were trying to tell him that it was lunchtime, but he wouldn't listen." At that point, I tried to help guide her and asked what was discussed regarding the wardroom, so she looked back at the book and read the two sentences next to each other that included the word "wardroom" and the sentence immediately after them to answer me. To help her build off of that, we looked back to the first sentence and I asked her what they were talking about. Since she wasn't sure, I told her when certain sentences don't seem to make sense it helps to keep looking back further to make connections. She became very excited and gasped when she went back a few paragraphs and discovered why Henry had said "'Silly to think that way, I know'" (p. 51).
Even though this was only my first reading conference with my student, I learned a few very useful concepts that I will keep in mind for future reference. First and foremost, it doesn't matter how good a student's graphophonics are if they don't comprehend what they're reading. Also, a point that I already believed but was reinforced through our conference was even though a student might appear to be an amazing reader, there is always something they can improve upon, you just have to find it.
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