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].