Second Meeting

During the second meeting with my reader we spent the majority of the time discussing his interests as a reader, a student, and outside of the classroom. Although benchmarking is an extremely important task to complete so the child can be taught at the correct instructional level, I believe that it is just as important to know the child in all aspect of their life so that we can create an instruction that appeals to them. To do this, I gave my reader an interest inventory, which we completed and discussed together. I learned that his favorite subject in school is science because he gets to complete experiments and that he dislikes writing because it makes his hand tired. I have found that many children begin to dislike writing because it places them in physical pain and as a teacher this is worth considering. His favorite place to read is at home, because he can read in a comfortable place in his room. He also indicated that his favorite genre is non-fiction and he likes to read anything about sports. He plays soccer outside of school and is looking forward to this coming season. He has six pets, 3 birds and 3 fish. I also felt like I needed to find out what motivates this child to read as I work with him. Therefore, I gave him a reading attitude survey that we also completed and discussed together. Overall, the student in internally motivated to read and enjoys it. However, he is most excited to read in the comfort of his own home. We then completed the Elementary Spelling Inventory (ESI). I told him that I wanted him to write the words as he heard them and that this test would not be graded but that it was important that he do his best. After analyzing this test I found that the student understood initial and final consonants, short vowels, digraphs, blends, long vowels, other vowels, and syllable structures. However, the student struggles with inflected endings which I will target in my instruction to come. We ended our session by having him read aloud to me and also noticed that he reads with little expression. Therefore, we will be working on voice and adding expression as we read as opposed to reading monotone and in short phrases as we are reading aloud. Reading fluency is related to the child’s ability to comprehend the text they are reading. Therefore, working with the child with fluency will help build his ability to comprehend what he is reading. This meeting has allowed me to access the information necessary to provide effective instruction for the student and help further his reading abilities. I am currently thinking about reading the book Tangerine by Edward Bloor based off of the information I have gathered from the intrest inventory.

The reading attitude survey we completed can be found at: http://www.professorgarfield.org/parents_teachers/printables/pdfs/reading/readingsurvey.pdf