Ever since Joey started kindergarten I’ve struggled with the idea of how to assess his reading ability. Although I can encourage him to use his device to match the words on the page, thi
s is laborious and time consuming for him. It certainly does not promote reading fluency or the phonemic process needed to decode unfamiliar words. But, if Joey isn’t read aloud, how do we know he’s reading?
When we read leveled books I try to take turns reading words with Joey. As we read I’ll point under each word and talk about how my voice or the word on the device matches the word on the page. I’ll pause at words Joey can quickly read on his device, or at words that I want Joey to learn to read on his device so that he has an opportunity to read the word as we go. I have each word from the sentence laminated on a piece of paper with velcro so that Joey can build the sentence himself when given the words. This requires him to attend to the different letters in each word and put them in sequential order – holding each word in his head as we place it in a meaningful spot in a sentence.
Joey continues to impress us with his strong visual memory. It seems as though I can introduce a sight word to him once, and he will soon be able to find it from a field of six. His ability to receptively identify these words in isolation continues to impress me. So we know he is able to recognize words. How do we get him from reading these words to reading and understanding what he reads? How do we measure that? How do we know when he is achieving it and it is time to increase the level of the work we give him?
