Jack

Today Jack was phenomenal!  For the past few weeks he has been receiving remedial reading help at school, and I can really see the difference!  I told mom that working 1 hour with me once a week just wasn't cutting it, and we were so happy that his school stepped up to give him the extra support he needs during the day! 

One main issue that had negative implications on his ability to sound out words was his difficulty with naming all of his letters.  About three weeks ago I tackled this issue by implementing a new task - DIBELS Letter Naming Fluency - into our routine.  The first week, he read 26 letters in one minute from a sheet that has the letters (uppercase and lowercase) in random order.  He skipped a line, confused the lowercase 'g' with 'a' and made various other mistakes.  This score (26 letters) placed him in the 'at risk' category.  After practicing letter recognition and sounds for the last few weeks, I am so happy to announce that Jack was able to recognize 38 letters correctly in one minute today!!!  This places him in the 'some risk' category, however, to be considered as having 'low risk' for reading problems, Jack needs to be able to recognize 40 letters within one minute by the time he finishes kindergarten.  We're just two letters away!!

Sean and Brian

For the past couple of weeks I've been focusing on fluency with Brian.  He is so good at remembering sounds, blending sounds, and sounding out all the words he comes across, but he says each sound first and then says the word.  So, here's what he sounds like:  Read aloud, "The fox jumped over the log."  Now read it again and this time say each sound of each word before you say the word.  It takes sooooo long, and you barely remember reading the other words by the time you finish!  Brian has a tough time comprehending what he is reading simply because he has a lot of difficulty with reading the words fluently. [I have a description on fluency and comprehension my website, http://www.letsread.weebly.com/].  Sean had a similar issue when he was younger, and I wrote out simple phrases on flashcards and practiced those like we did sightwords.  I will be starting this same task with Brian this week.

I resumed timed reading practice with Sean last week.  I have reading passages that are at his reading level, and he reads aloud for one minute.  On a copy of this passage, I mark what words he gets wrong, and then at the end I add up all the words he correctly read.  We do this two more times with the same passage and then I take the middle score and we mark it on a chart.  He really enjoys this task, and loves it when the tables are turned and he gets to use my stopwatch to time me while I read.  We used to do this a long time ago when I first started working with him, but our sessions were not very consistent in the beginning, and I found that we were losing ground and not reaching his set goal within a decent time frame (or at all).  He seemed frustrated at times and so I put that task away and we did other things.  But recently his parents and I have worked out a pretty consistent schedule, and so I started this task again since I think it is awesome practice for gaining fluency.  [This task is basically the DIBELS Oral Reading Fluency task, however I do not use the DIBELS passages].