Sarah Gorr's Website

Summary

When I first began to work with Molly I was only told that she was a beginning reader. After her pre-assessments I was able to determine that she was on an instructional reading level B. She needed work with her sight words, decoding, and fluency strategies.

Each day that I worked with her we learned and worked on a new strategy. These strategies included: looking at the picture, using context clues, chunking the word, digraphs, consonant blends, silent e, and two vowels. She was very eager to learn and participate in the activities that I planed. We followed the same routine each session. First we completed a familiar read. We did this to warm up and work on her fluency skills. Next I would introduce the new text and we would complete a picture walk. After this, I would review the difficult vocabulary with Molly so she would be able to comprehend what she was reading. Next, we would do a guided reading of the new text. After the guided reading, Molly would read the story by herself out loud a couple of times to work on her fluency. This is called a repeated reading. After the reading I would introduce the new skill for the day and we would complete activities to go along with this. Molly would then read the new story one more time out loud. Finally we would work on her sight words with the Cinderella sight word game. This routine was repeated each session so that she would know the structure of our sessions and not be left guessing. It also made her more comfortable because she knew what was coming next.

At the end of the sessions I reassessed her. I found that she had advanced to an instructional reading level E. While she was reading during these assessments, I could tell that she was using the strategies that we had gone over. She progressed a lot over these sessions and I am positive that she will continue to excel in reading.