Today was my day to go to Xander’s school and read with the kids.
It’s actually a nifty program called Reading Naturally. The intent is to track the progress of all the kids in how well they are reading and help them move along through actually reading and modeling it for the child.
For instance, I will do what we call a cold read with the child to see where they are at the beginning of the session. It is a measurement of how well they read in a minute (how far they get through a story at a particular level and how many mistakes in that story with an actual number at the end). After that, I model it by reading it. During that, my modeling it is about tone, inflection, emotion and other things that make a story reading really interesting to an audience. We discuss the elements for a minute and maybe any special things they do right or wrong. They do a practice session or two. Then we follow it up with another measured read called a warm read.
It is amazing how well they improve in just the cold read to the warm read. It is also amazing to see the graph and how well they are improving through the year. Some at slow rates and some at truly phenomenal rates.
Kathy and I are truly blessed with both Xander’s reading ability and also his desire to read.
One thing I noticed today (I got to read with Xander and 3 other kids), is that except for Xander all the other kids seemed rusty and when I went to graph them – that assessment held up. I’m sure it was due to spring break. Xander on the other hand was reading all through spring break so he wasn’t rusty at all and in fact was probably better off.
It’s amazing even with the rustiness though at how fast they bounce back because while they were rusty for the cold read they all seemed to be back at their old selves for the warm reads. Kids are such phenomenal learners.