EDRG 604 - Blog #7 running records

Blog #7 running records

         According to the running records guru, Marie M. Clay, running records capture what young readers say and do while reading short, continuous text.  Running records taken at regular intervals can plot a path of progress.  What’s most important for the teacher to note is how the student monitors, solves words, and self-corrects.  This information can then be used to plan instruction for a particular student, a small group with similar needs, or the class as a whole.

         Both of my ELL students are on verge of exiting out of our school’s ESL program.   Mia is the weaker of the two.  I used the text from DRA2 titled, Trouble at the Beaver Pond Level 38.  The word count was 227 and she made only two errors – onto for into and long for lodge. This passage took her a long time to read (4:02).  The first word error (onto for into) tells me that Mia used both meaning and syntax.  What she didn’t do was look at the beginning letter and recognized this high frequency word.  Did it inhibit the meaning of the story?  If Mia went back and reread that section of the text, she would notice that the beaver began packing the mud “into” the dam and not “onto” the dam.  If she had some background knowledge of how beavers make dams she might not have made this error.  My teaching point for her would be to ask her to look again at the sentence.  My belief is that she would immediately self-correct.  I would ask her if the word she said changed the meaning of the sentence and I would listen for her to change her thinking about the difference between onto/into and probe further for her to give me other examples using those two words.

When thinking about her other error – long for lodge, I would say she made a meaning error because long does not make sense in the context of the sentence.  “The round, mud-covered roof of the long (lodge) rose above the water.” She used some visual cues because the beginning sounds are correct and they are both one-syllable words.  I would say to her, “you said long, does that make sense?”  Again, my instincts in working with her this year tell me that she would be able to self correct and then we could talk about the context within the sentence.  Mia is a budding actress and can pull off sounding like she understands everything she reads when on many occasions she does not.  My goal for her would be to continue to monitor her comprehension progress.

         Nour is also very close to exiting out of ESL.  He read the same passage at a much faster rate than Mia (2:05); however, he made a few more miscues than she did.  His first error was saying long for log.  He used visual cues in that he has said most of the letters correct.  Does he have any background knowledge of beaver dams?  Again, I’m not sure.   Inserting the word long for log doesn’t drastically change the meaning of the sentence.  (The mother beaver rested by the long (log) dam for a moment.  I would ask Nour to go back and reread the sentence to see if it was simply a “reading too quickly” error.  The next miscue he made was self-correcting div for dive.  Because he self corrected, I can assume he knows the silent e rule and that saying div probably didn’t sound correct to him both in that it is not a real word and that it doesn’t fit within the context of the sentence.  His next miscue was loge for lodge which he self corrected.  Again, I believe he used his visual cues and meaning and self corrected because his initial response did not make sense.  His last error was hind with a short i sound for hind (as in hind feet).  Because this word is a tricky word and is an exception to the rule, it is understandable that he might make this mistake.  My next teaching point for him would be to pull out some of those exception to the rule words for him to review.  I might ask Nour to reread the sentence to see if he could figure out the correct pronunciation using the context of the sentence.  There are enough clues in the sentence for him to figure out the hind means back feet.

I did not notice any features that reflect either Nour’s or Mia’s first language.  Both are proficient and I often forget that they are second language learners.  Sometimes their background knowledge is lacking as well as some of the deeper thinking in interpretation of stories. I’d forgotten how valuable taking the time to do running records can be for providing next steps in instruction for not only my ELL students, but for my mainstream struggling readers, too.  Always too much to do and not enough time.