Running Records

WHEN?
Running records (RR) should be done on a regular basis with your students (on level = 1x per month; below = bi-weekly).

WHY?
The purpose is to record the process and behaviors the student exhibits while reading to inform our instruction on both fluency (accuracy, rate, expression) AND comprehension. We want to see what the students are doing and understanding independently with the texts they are choosing.

If you have a very fluent reader, who is accurate and expressive, you will want to focus on the comprehension discussion after the sample of the student's reading.

WHAT TO USE?
You can pre-count words in a common text for a student to read during small group instruction. If you are conferring with a student, make sure you know the level of the student's own book, and listen to them read. Depending on the type of book the student is reading, usually a page and a half to a page is usually 100 words.


HOW?

Great 8: Questioning

For this month's thinking strategy...

4th grade Anchor chart made in class with students, their questions, and the ideas "inspired by" Harvey and Goudvis (Strategies That Work), and Debbie Miller (Reading with Meaning).

Love That Dog by Sharon Creech used for my think alouds, and student stop and jots.

digital reading

This is the last week of the myON reading contest! If you are encouraging your students to use myON during reading workshop, here are some things to think about.

We want students to be actively reading. That means keeping tracks of their thinking: sharing reactions, visualizations (mental movies), predictions, confusing parts, and "new" words.

We train our students to use sticky notes to track their thoughts while reading. This should continue when students are reading digital texts.


SET UP

In our classroom, my co-teacher and I had the students set up their reading notebooks (in their "Stop and Jot" section) as shown in the picture below. We walked around making sure students understood how to organize their notebooks, and conferred with them about their thinking, prompting them to write down their thoughts.
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We told students:

• they are reading for 30 minutes they should have 3 thoughts written down.
• if they finish one book, start the same routine with another book

CONTENT

Since our class has been practicing retelling, visualizing, predicting, reacting, etc., students have a choice of their 3 thoughts most days. However, some days I do specify the type of thinking I want them to focus on recording. For example, I might say: you need to stop at one part and write a prediction, and sketch a visualization at 2 other parts.

If students have a difficult time stopping and jotting down their thoughts, you may want them to choose a page number to stop at before they start reading