Dillon had a great session. He did well on his fluency drills and continues to work on speed and accuracy as we go beyond the first 300 words in the drill.
During our session, we worked on conjunctions because he had problems with the usage questions in the passage last week. In speaking with him, he reported that they are not doing much grammar work in school. He mentioned that in the first grade he learned about nouns and verbs, but reported that this year they are mostly working on decoding in small groups. Florida second grade standards include nouns, verbs, pronouns, reflexive pronouns, adverbs, comparative and superlative adjectives and increasing the complexity of sentence structure. These skills are assessed on the state assessments. We will touch upon these grammar elements as we continue our work.
Next, he silently read the Read Works passage titled, “Landslides” and answered a series of comprehension questions. He was encouraged to use a highlighter and a pencil to make notations when finding text evidence to support his answers. Usually, I have him read orally, but today I wanted to assess his independence and strategy usage. When we reviewed and discussed his responses it became clear that Dillon tended to choose the first response when given a choice of three and then stopped reading further responses. We talked about the importance of reading all three responses before selecting the best answer. We also reviewed the need to look carefully at the wording of the questions to see if there were any signal words or key words that could help him choose the most suitable answer. These test taking strategies will help him meet with success and will be reinforced during our sessions.
Dillon works hard and is showing steady growth. He is a pleasure to work with and I enjoy hearing his viewpoints.

Dillon is very excited for the coming holiday and school vacation and asked whether he would have “homework” from me during the break. My assignment – enjoy your family and friends, relax, have fun and read-read-read!