Thinking about struggling readers.

One of my third grade students struggles with decoding words. The students normally read a story together as a class during the week, and then take comprehension quizzes independently on Fridays. This student struggles immensely with some of those quizzes. When I am helping her work through the questions, she will try to read the questions out loud to me, which is how I recognized her decoding struggle. She does not get a fair chance to answer the question accurately because she cannot decode the question and answers. When I read the questions to her, and she thinks back to the story (which was read aloud earlier in the week), she knows the right answer almost immediately. She can evidently comprehend a story, but the decoding is a big issue for her.

The student is in first grade and lacks the ability to identify sight words despite constant practice. He manages to comprehend what is occurring in a story by looking at the picture for clues – which is a great start. However, his inability to recognize sight words leads to him having a lack of fluency and interest in what he is reading. He often becomes distracted or wants to talk about something other than the story when it is time to read.

This semester, I am in a STEM class, so I do not get to see many students IEP. However, I see certain students have a hard time reading their lab notebooks, and they get frustrated when they do not understand what they have to do.

One of my students that seems to struggle to read is an ELL learner that can fluently speak both English and Spanish in a 5th grade classroom. In all subject areas, the student struggles to read and understand the meaning of vocabulary words in English. The student reads at a second grade level and there is an ELL teacher that pushes into the classroom occasionally to help the multiple ELL that are in the class. Sometimes they student works individually or in small groups with the ELL teacher.

The student is strong in communicating verbally but gets stuck on reading and understanding vocabulary terms he doesn’t know and becomes frustrated so that he stops reading and zones out which is causing him to fall further behind in his reading level. The student sits at a desk right in front of the teacher’s desk but becomes easily distracted because he tries to interact with his peers at the closest desk group. He reads books with no assistive technology sometimes but also uses the system Epic when the rest of the class is using it too during readers workshop. The student needs to be able to expand his vocabulary repertoire so that he can read things on grade level and keep more focus.

Two students immediately come to mind when I think of struggling readers or learners. The first student is in my kindergarten class now. He struggles greatly when it comes to letter recognition and fine motor skills. He has a difficult time recognizing most written symbols such as numbers as well. He has cried in class because he was so lost and didn't have the voice to speak up to the teacher. Another student I had was a special education first grade student. Decoding and segmenting was very difficult and frustrating for him. He had cried a few times as well due to his frustration. Both these students receive one on one attention from a specialist but I am not exactly sure what they do.

My student is in fifth grade and struggles with reading fluency. Her comprehension is not as bad as she somewhat knows what she is reading. The teacher already has the student work on programs on her chrome book for the time being to see her progress and for her to be involved, but she will be tested as the school believes that se may need an IEP.

My student is in third grade and struggles to read. He gets frustrated and shuts down and says he hates reading because it is stupid. He shows interest in stories about baseball but is afraid to read in front of the class because he says he can't do it. I think he struggles with fluency and pace, because when he reads slower he cannot understand what he is reading. He is in a general education classroom with no pull out or push in and he does not have an IEP; however, there is a clear need for more support for the student.

My student is in the fourth grade, and she struggles with reading comprehension. Her fluency is pretty good, but her comprehension skills are struggling. She is given plenty of time to read in the environment class, and her task is that she is expected to read for at least 20 minutes at home a night. A tool I think she could use is Newsela, so she could take comprehension quizzes at the end of her readings to track her comprehension skills.

My student was in Kindergarten and struggled to focus while he read. He was a five year old boy who loved monsters. At the time of my practicum experience, he was being observed by school counselors. The teacher of the classroom had assisstive technology already in place such a velcro on the table, a rubber band on the legs of the chair, and a separate yellow chair which the student used during circle time. When asked to read words, he made them up without even looking on the page. His writing and drawings were not clear and looked more like scriblbles. It seemed like the student was easily distracted by the action in the classroom. Many students in the class were students completing a second year of Kindergarten. One student had a aide in the classroom as well.

My struggling reader is frustrated. He has difficulty with identifying letters, therefore he does not make the correct sounds when reading. Because of his confusion when it comes to identifying letters, he begins to get spacey and does not pay attention to the assignment. I think that perhaps because he cannot accurately identify specific letters, instead of getting angry with himself, he choses to just not pay attention to his work. He will begin to doodle pictures and think about other things in the classroom. Whenever I am at the school, I try my best to sit with him and help him when it comes to reading or even sounding out words for kid writing, but even when a teacher is there to maintain his focus, he will still zone out when asked a question about identifying specific letters.

What struggling to read looks like to me in the student I have in mind is: low reading comprehension, difficulty decoding words, slow reading pace, and a lack of enthusiasm for reading. The student is reading approximately three grade levels below their current grade level.  The student is an ELL student, and is still struggling to read in English. They are in a 3rd grade classroom. They struggle with reading directions and word problems in math, as well as with reading books and prompts in reading/writing class.  Some of the student’s strengths are verbal communication, creativity, and math. The student does not receive any extra differentiation or AT, other than being in a bilingual classroom.  The class is expected to read homework and tests prompts. It is essential for the student to be able to read and comprehend test questions, as they currently struggle with this.

In thinking about struggling readers, I think about fluency and also in the amount in which they are hearing reading or doing their own reading. Student's struggle to blend unfamiliar sounds and recognize "sight words". I talked about in the SETT worksheet about an older student who also is struggling to read because of learning disabilities. So he/she is finding it hard to figure out more complicated information text for his/her social studies class. So while beginning readers are struggling, so can readers that are trying to read above their level or trying to navigate a learning disability.

When I think of struggling readers, I think of the students who lack fluency. If a child can not blend words into meaning and continue to read, sentence by sentence, it is obvious to see who is struggling. This is easy to see when a child is reading aloud.

Another way to see a struggling reader is if a student is messing up words in the sentence. For example, from the Understood module, I got to see how a struggling third grade reader reads. This child messes up "b" and "d" and therefore, the word does not make sense in the English language.

When I think of a student that struggles to read, immediately my mind goes to a student in first grade. I first noticed this students struggle with reading when doing sight words. Our classroom set of sightwords has one side with the word and a descriptive picture illustrating the word and the other side, the "hard" side is simply the word. This student always opts for the picture side and it's evident that the student is trying to figure out the word from the picture, rather than reading. For example, if the word on the card is "Went" and the picture is a group of people walking, the student will say "Go." While this student is currently struggling with reading he excels in comprehension when orally told a story.

This student is in third grade and he seems to struggle with reading comprehension. The student struggled with an assignment on making inferences from the text. He had difficulty with decoding the text to answer comprehension questions. The student's strengths include reading fluency and sequence of events. The learning environment was a computer test on reading comprehension of a textbook passage which the student needed to complete independently.

Starting with knowing the students strength and weakness. Knowing how the students performs in all areas and courses of their academics allows for you to pinpoint what area of reading their are struggling. For example, if a student does not like social studies class and this class seems to be their weakness this can mean that the student struggles with reading comprehension and possibly might have a hard time being able to use factual text. Another example is if a student seems to enjoy writing but has trouble putting their thought on paper. The teacher can target their strength of being able to be creative in this area but they might struggle in organization skills. Looking at the environment in which the student is learning in is also important. The classroom should be arranged in an unproblematic way, meaning little clutter as well as minimal distraction around the room. Materials and equipment should be available to the students that might be able to enhance their learning. For struggling readers it might be overwhelming looking at an entire page of words, there can be things that would allow the students to track and isolate a sentence at a time. Other materials can be laptops available, a program on the laptop can be that when a student is reading a book online the word which they should be reading would be enlarged and highlighted. Finally the tasks given to the student, what is given and should be expected should be within their zone of proximal development. Nothing too over-whelming and frustrating for the student to shut down once it gets too hard. It also would be helpful to cut out any fluff for the students, instead of giving them a lot of extra information, provide the information that they only need in order to be successful within that lesson.