Running Records Part 1

Yesterday I talked about matching your child to an appropriate level of book and promised to teach you how to do that. Today I am going to teach you how to do a running record. Running records are a way to record your child while he/she is reading to determine two things. First, is the book at your child's independent (94-100% accuracy), instructional (90-94%), or hard (89-0%) level? Second, it will help you determine what strategies your child is using while reading and what strategies your child is neglecting. Knowing the strategies used and neglected will help you to know what you need to emphasize in his/her reading instruction. In my college class, I teach pre-service teachers how to use this tool. It enables them to teach specifically to the needs of each child. Many teachers do not use this, however. As home school parents we have the perfect opportunity to tailor instruction straight to our childrens' needs. This tool makes it possible. So, this first lesson will teach the conventions of running records. This link gives the conventions that I will describing so please refer to it as I go along - http://10ss.qtp.nsw.edu.au/ELO/stage1/module3/convPrint.html. Running records are kind of like shorthand. It is a record of your child's reading without any intervention from you thus showing what he/she can do and is one of the best informal assessments of reading. The first mark to learn is correct reading. For each word read correctly, you will give a check for the word. So if the book said, "One little dog going in" and the child read it accurately, you would have five checks aaaaa. For anything other than correct reading the symbol will be like a fraction. On the top will be what the child said and on the bottom will be the actual text. (I have to break this up b/c it won't fit on one post - continued above)