Running Record

January 18th.

I feel like a broken record with every post, but again today was amazing. I finally met my host teacher and she is perfect. She is young, adorable, strict, nice, smart, and everything I aspire to be.

She asked me to do two bulletin boards. My first assignment! Hah such a breeze. Then she asked me to help her with testing students' reading levels. It was so fun to do an actual running record with students. For all those non education people out there I'll explain. A student is given a short one page story to read. They are suppose to read the first 100 words aloud while I follow along with my own copy of the story. I let them read and everytime they say something different than the text I write what they said above the word they are trying to read. For example, if the sentence was, "Mom and Dad love to travel, but haven't been on a vacation in a while" and the student were to actually say, "My Mom and Dad like to travel, and haven't been on vacation in a wind" I would write down the added "my", the "like" instead of love and "wind" instead of while. At the end you count their mistakes with their self corrections to test their fluency as well as comprehension. With the way it works it tells you where they are as a reader.It's amazing how some kids can read really well but have no idea what they read. Obviously its key to have fluency plus comprehension. Anyway, I used to do running records for homework with recordings of students reading. It was amazing to actually do it with a real student and see my college education paying off. Yay college! It was nice that the girl I was testing moved up a level too. I loved telling her contrats you can start reading more challenging books! She went right over to the class library and started looking through her new selection. I love this.

So I'm currently typing this in the subway on my way downtown to met the lovely Lucy! One of my best girlfriends from upstate. Ever since I met her about four years ago we've been very close. One of those girls you can go months or years without seeing and its as if no time has passed. In this case a lot of months has passed. She has been living in the city for quite some time now and we just haven't had many opportunities to catch up. I can only imagine how much we have to talk about.

(This WAS typed on my iphone, but the blog app kept shutting down when I tried to post. There is so much more to post about since then. It is finally friday and I can catch up on a lot of things, homework, blog, and most important SLEEP)