It was a pleasure getting to know Dillon during our first tutoring session. He is a pleasure to talk with and he was very open about sharing his ideas and opinions. We started today’s session with a get to know you activity. As he filled out a “Get to know you questionnaire” I was able to quickly learn a little bit about him. He freely shared his ideas and was very open and receptive to my questions.
Next, Dillon was given the Qualitative Reading Inventory to determine his reading level. On the word lists, Dillon scored on the Instructional Level for 2nd grade. On the non—fiction passage titled “Seasons”, his miscues indicated that he attends to the beginning consonants and does not attend to the medial vowels and word endings. He quickly read through the article not noticing that the word “brings” which he used to replace the word “begins” did not always make sense. His 11 miscues placed him at the instructional level for this passage. Comprehension questions again placed him at the 2nd grade level for this reading inventory. Initially, I noticed that he relies a great deal on prior knowledge - and did not demonstrate an ability to return to the text and cite specific examples, a task which represents “close” reading and is the subject of reading assessments in the 3rd grade. Practice in close reading will be included in our lessons as we move forward.
Based on these assessments, I plan on reviewing the high frequency words to determine if these words need further work in ensuring automaticity. We will focus our initial tutoring lessons on non-fiction texts and close reading. I plan on including text features as part of our instruction in informational text as that is an expectation on the state assessments.
Dillon is a hard worker, and I believe he will make good progress as we focus on close reading and his ability to read for information.