Jbilangino3

Unfortunately, during most of my site visits, I rarely have the opportunity to watch students learn Language Arts. However, I often find myself wandering around the classroom viewing the materials that are available to the students. During this visit, I noticed a collections folded-paper books in a bin labeled fluency. Curious as to what these books were used for, I asked my cooperating teacher. The teacher explained to me that she has many different leveled readers in her class. Other than for the PLP students in her classroom, the school does not provide her with much to test student’s fluency. Therefore, she went and purchased a kit of different leveled readings to assess student’s fluency for herself. In the beginning of every year, the starts by asking the students to read from these books and then she makes notes about how long it took them to read the passage, where they made mistakes, and how well they can summarize the passage after reading it. For the first two months of school, she does her best to test each student’s fluency about once a week, and then focusing on assessing them only every two to three weeks. Personally, I am quite shocked the school does not provide the teacher with some kind of program to assess her student’s fluency to begin with. I would definitely consider using this method to assess in my own classroom one day. My teacher describes this form of assessment to be extremely beneficial to her and her students. She uses the results from this assessment to help guide students in finding a book for independent reading that is appropriate for their reading level. This kit also helps her to focus on working with the students who need improvement and also helps to track their progress throughout the school year. Journal 4