Module 1: Watch & Learn: Assessing Reading Skills Review

 

This video was very interesting to watch. This video provided me with a better understanding of assessing students on a continual basis. On-going assessments are crucial for student learning. Assessments give teachers a clear understanding of the students learning deficiencies, and allows for teachers to prepare lessons that ultimately help the students’ learning needs. As a teacher, I believe a variety of assessments should be used to assess students learning. By using a variety of assessments, teachers are able to receive immediate feedback, which allows for well-planned instruction that meets the needs of the students. As a classroom teacher, I use a variety of assessment to fully understand my students’ needs as a learner. It’s important to know and understand student’s strengths and weakness, and how to plan effectively for their learning. Reading is comprised of some many different aspects. It’s important for the teacher to understand where students are struggling with their reading. By labeling a child a struggling reading, a teacher is not identifying the real problem. Using assessments allows the teacher to pinpoint the exact issue the student is having with their reading. Once the reading issue has been identified, the teacher is able to provide instruction to meet the needs of the reader. Differentiate instruction is a common term used in my school. Through differentiated instruction, teachers are able to provide instruction at the students’ level. It’s a well-known fact that assessments help drive your instruction. If this is the case, then assessments should be on a continual basis, not just once and awhile. Assessments play a key role in student success, and it’s the teachers responsibility to help improve their reading abilities by providing effective instruction, and then assessing students understanding. It’s our number one priority…ensuring success of all students. Student success can be accomplished with the use of assessments.  

Module 1: Optiz pg. 14

This school year I’m teaching an accelerated second grade class. Most of my students are proficient readers, either on grade level or advanced. However, I do have a small group of students who are struggling with reading. This small group of students allows me to spend a little more time and focus on skills to help them achieve their reading goals. I haven’t   administered the Fountas and Pinnell reading assessment. I spend my first week of school setting up expectations and establishing classroom procedure. I will begin my reading assessments next week. I have had the opportunity to look over their student portfolios from last year. While looking at their reading assessments I was able to see what each student struggled with and how I can provide instruction to meet their needs.

After reading questions fourteen from Opitz’s text, I decided to focus on my less proficient readers in my class. Last week was the first week of school. It was a very busy start of the school year. After looking at my student portfolios I wanted to fully understanding each struggling student. I found time to listen to a few of my students read a short text to see where they may be struggling at.  One particular student really stood out to me. (Maybe it’s because I was his teacher last year and knew his strengthens and weakness in reading) While listening to this student read I noticed he concentrating on reading word by word. He really wanted to get every word in the text correct, but by doing this he was slowing down and his fluency was really suffering. His comprehension also suffered because he was reading at a slower rate and forgetting was he had already read. Often times this struggling reading would guess at unfamiliar words in the text, and most often the substitutions did not have the same meaning as the text he was reading. This also contributed to the lack of comprehension when this student was reading. Over the course of the school year, my plan is to help this student change the way he is reading. Students should be reading for meaning and not focusing on individual letter sounds.  It’s my job as the classroom teacher to help him read for meaning and focus on understand the sentence in context.