We started out the morning by using one of Gretchen Bernabei's kernel essay formats to direct our thinking about kids who were not growing in their guided reading groups.We used the "Picking Up the Pieces" model.
As a heading, write the name and level of a student in your class that is not growing.
1. What happened? On the first sticky note, write about what the student was doing in the last running record. What kind of errors did the student make?
2. Why didn't you see it coming? What have you already tried with this student?
3. What damage does this cause? What impact does the student's reading behaviors have on comprehension, predictions, inferences, summary, etc.?
4. What will you/did you do? What did yo try for your teaching point or intervention?
After teachers had time to share their thinking, each teacher brought forward a student to the group for problem solving.
Matthew is a bilingual (ish) student who struggles with being able to break words apart, remembering characters (their names), and remembering the sounds that letters make. His teacher reports that he cuts off endings and doesn't really have many strategies to make sense of what he is reading. She says that you can tell that he "feels behind" and is easily frustrated.
First, we coded the errors that he made by which cues he was using and which he was neglecting.
colors for clues
Matthew appears to be using visual cues to solve. He is looking at the beginning and end of the word. He sees the high point in the word with the letter l. His miscue fits structurally as it is makes sense in terms of grammar. Both words are plural nouns. What he isn't doing is using meaning. Colors doesn't make sense in terms of what came before in the sentence or in context of the story he was reading. What he isn't doing is using smooth tracking all the way through the word. He's looking at the whole word as a chunk rather than attending to a smooth tracking through all the letters in the word.
We also discussed that he might not be pronouncing the blend cl correctly. "/kuh/ /l/" sounds more like the beginning of /kulors/ than /kloos/.
water for weather
The same analysis for the previous miscue applies here as well. In addition, he appears to be reading consonants and disregarding vowel pairs, ue from the previous miscue and ea from this one.
might for may
This one fascinated me. The bilingual teacher in the group - not the child's teacher - pointed out that in Spanish, you pronounce the word "may" as /my/! We would never have known that if we were not collectively using our expertise and experience as a group to discuss how to help this child. In this case, the child was using initial visual cues, structural cues, and meaning cues that included the schema from his Spanish influences.
Initial look at the miscues led us to think that the child was having trouble with decoding. Previous attempts to support the child focused on helping the child focus on the visual features of the word. It wasn't until we coded the miscues and analyzed the patterns that we saw the truth.Yet, when we looked at the miscues for patterns of error, we noticed that the child never corrected himself. He had no awareness that his miscues did not make sense!
He needed to attend to meaning first, then cross check for visual and smooth tracking through the word to help him solve at the point of his difficulty.
Here's the response we decided needed to occur for the teaching point or intervention:
After the student read, go back and read the sentence to the student as he read it. Ask, "Did that make sense?" and discuss. What word didn't make sense? In this text, the miscue was /colors/. " What word might fit the story better?" Discuss. "I want you to notice when things don't make sense. Can you stop next time that happens? Let me show you what you can do if something doesn't make sense. Go back to the beginning of the sentence and reread until you get to the part that doesn't make sense. That will get your brain thinking about the story again. Now, we can stop and think."
"When you read it the first time, you said /colors/." Write that word or use magnetic letters. Use slow articulation as you write or push the letters into Elkonin boxes while you stretch out the sounds.
Next, go to the word in the text. In this instance, the word is clue. Cover the word with a popsicle stick. "If this word was colors, what letter would come first?" Accept the answer and uncover. Keep going for each of the letters/sounds until there is a discrepancy. In this instance, the child will notice immediately that colors and clue aren't matching. Keep uncovering the letters one or two at a time, depending on the blends or vowel cues that might need support. "Good readers, see all the letters in the word. Their eyes track smoothly across the word from the beginning to the end. It might be easy to miss a word if you are only looking at parts of it." Circle the letters that are similar - c/l/s. Notice that Matthew did this in the word /weather/ as well.
Now use the techniques to bring a word to fluency. (I guess I'll have to write about that later.)
This teaching point is going to help him with self correcting for meaning and cross checking for visual at the point of difficulty. This might just be the key to moving him to the next level very quickly.
What we learned: When kids aren't moving, bring the kid before your PLC for problem solving. Talk to your curriculum person. Or text/email me. Together, we can find solutions.
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