Melissa Parris Post #5: Conferences With My Focus Group

I have always enjoyed reading with individual students during "Reading Party," but keeping notes on these conferences and using those notes to drive my instruction has been helpful.  I chose  group of students all of whom read below grade level...some well below grade level.  I have learned that this particular group of students responds well to the Reading Recovery strategies for figuring out unknown words.  Read Well and our basal reader are both highly phonetic programs, so using the Reading Recovery strategies gives them a different kind of strategy to figure out unknowns. These particular students respond particularly well to "check the picture" and "say blank and keep reading."  I have found, in the past, that as students become more fluent readers the "go back and re-read" strategy works well, but his group of students does not yet have the fluency necessary to use this strategy. The reading conferences with these students has allowed me to emphasize these strategies with my focus group.  Because these strategies were so helpful for these below-level readers, I have been reminding the whole class about them and encouraging them to try these strategies.

On a different note, I was impressed with some reading that a couple of my students' growth in reading and wanted to celebrate them so I let those students read aloud to the class.  The rest of the class thought that was great so the following day, almost every student in my room wanted to read a few pages aloud to their classmates. It was great to see the children cheer each other on celebrate each others' successes.