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Decoding Strategies
TO INCREASE READING FLUENCY
Rationale
In my First Grade classroom, I had many students who were reading at a variety of levels at the beginning of the year. Four of my students had Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) with specific reading goals and two were reading and comprehending at well above grade level. Students struggled with phonics assessments as they were unable to isolate sounds in a word to find words with similar sounds.
My district recently adopted an updated evaluation system that included a variety of new assessments. During the first two weeks of the year, my students were assessed on their oral reading fluency using an AimsWebPlus reading passage. The district’s benchmark goal for the beginning of the year was 29 words per minute (wpm). Three students were reading between 0-12 wpm, three students were reading between 13-19 words per minute, and three students were reading between 20-28 words per minute. Eight of my students met or exceeded the districts Fall benchmark goal. With these results and additional testing, seven of my students qualified to receive reading support with the schools reading specialist.
During guided reading, students were only able to identify strategies to use to decode words that they did not know 23 percent of the time. More than half of my students were reading in my below-level readers, provided by my district's reading curriculum. These students relied on the repeated sentence patterns to read the stories. My advanced level readers struggled to decode longer words as well because they had relied heavily on their ability to memorize and recall words.
Reading is vital to everything we do in school and is something that will help my students across all academic areas. Reading fluency will help students with math when they need to read a story problem and use the words and phrases in the problem to plan out how they will answer. Reading fluency will also help my students with their reading comprehension. Students completed a fresh read each week and then answered questions about the passage. My students were more focused on being able to read the words than they were on understanding what they were reading. Therefore, they struggled to understand the text.
Initial Data
*9 out of 17 students did not meet the Fall AIMSweb plus benchmark score of 29 words per minute (wpm).
*7 students qualified to work with the school's reading specialist.
*Students were able to use strategies to decode words that they did not know 23 %
of the time.
*Comprehension scores were at 68% in November, 2017 prior to implementation of strategies.
Data to be Collected
QUALITATIVE
*Ancedotal notes about students' use of decoding strategies were taken throughout guided reading groups.
QUANTITATIVE
*AIMSweb Plus Oral Reading Fluency Assessments were given in the Fall, Winter, and Spring.
*Fresh reads were used weekly and focused on the first and last reads for the week.
*Weekly Reading Street High Frequency Words and Phonics Assessment were given at the end of each week.
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