Personal+Learnings+from+Practicum

=You know the poem - All I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten? While here is a space for you to reflect and identify at least one thing you learned about reading or readers during the semester's practicum. Please include your name along with a line or two or short paragraph about how the practicum has transformed your understanding of reading.=

Sally Willsey: I learned that when you have a reader who can read fairly fast, you don't have to worry about the check marks as much as you need to catch the errors. A truly fluent reader (more than 120 words per minute) can make it difficult to get all of the accuracy along with the errors. The pauses are more telling and the errors made then the speed. The checking of comprehension is quite important at this stage. A student who can read with speed doesn't always comprehend what they are reading. The student may not remember what the reading is about at all. It is nothing but a bunch of words on a page to be read as fast as possible. Sometimes students who read with speed don't read with prosody. You may have to ask them to slow down and that is when they start to read with prosody. Keeping your student focused on the task at hand sometimes may be difficult. If what they are reading triggers some prior knowledge that conversation may lead to a greater understanding of the student as a reader as well.