Today was assessment day *cue the groans*
Our plan for the day with our ten-year-old was to start by getting him back on track after a long vacation to Mexico [lucky duck!]
We started by asking him questions about his trip—What was his favorite place? Did he get burned? What was his favorite activity? Did he have fun? Does he like to lay in the sun or swim? These questions just helped to spark up conversation and rapport. Since we hadn’t met with him in over a week, it was good to get back into the swing of things.
Then dun dun dunnnn….assessments. We started with word lists at the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th grade levels. He did well, getting 19/20 words on the 3rd grade list, but we did notice that he was taking longer to read the words than he normally does. Taking more than 1 second per word would mean that it actually isn’t a sight word. However, we thought that perhaps he was tired rather than actually struggling with the words. We decided that it would be in our best interest to test again at our following session, using 2nd – 6th grade lists to make sure we have a range that can accurately help assess.
After word lists we did two short reading passages. The first was one he had encountered in our initial session. Though true assessment is new material, we wanted to use this short passage to measure growth over the course of the 10 sessions. We saw that he made less miscues, dropping from an Instructional/Frustration level to an Instructional level, which is very good progress.
After the short passages we took a break and read a fun book about making ice cream together. The book was over-sized, so that was fun for him to play with and turn the pages.
Back to assessments: we did two timed reading passages, each twice. For the first timed passage, our student improved on his time from 3:00 minutes to 2:37. Hooray! In the second timed passage he shaved almost 1:20 from his time as well as dropped 2 miscues.
Our student does well with fluency, yet sometimes reads quickly and guesses at words rather than reading them. This will come with practice, but overall his improvement has been great! We plan to assess him even further on our final session, using the word lists and two new short passages.
Our final activity for the day was reading chapters from the book, The Million Dollar Shot. We’re almost finished with the book and he’s very excited to finish next time! Since that will be our final session, we have a party planned! Can’t wait!