Struggling readers are a very prominent thing in classrooms of today. Students come to the classroom with many different abilities for reading, many from the experiences that they have had before the school year. In my Kindergarten classroom we have not even started guided reading, but we have assessed students on their reading ability.
My favorite observation that I have made in my classroom so far is the inventive reading that some of my students participate in. One day a student picked up a book and read their own story out loud pretending to follow the words. As I watched the story became more and more intense with the illustrations. The student then stopped on one page and decided that the story did not make sense, so she started from the beginning. The same thing happened the next day, but this time there were many students crowding around to listen to the inventive story. I found this interesting because this student can rad simple text but she wanted the book to be so much more interesting, so she invented a story to follow the illustrations.
The students that struggle with letter recognition are my struggling readers in the classroom. My students that can recognize letters are trying to sound out the words when reading a book. The books that are located in our classroom library are for many different levels and I think that this is because we do not want the students to feel that they have to read simple text to be successful.
I cannot wait for reading to be implemented in the classroom so that I can see how my students perform based on their knowledge at this time.
Cara Knight's Blog 