Wild Friday Night…

On Thursday, Adi said something about school that didn’t quite sit right with me. “My teacher did a reading assessment with me. She said I had to hurry up. I only had two minutes. So I didn’t finish. She said we will have to try again in another month.” This left me with a lot of questions. I gathered enough information to know that it was a benchmark running record. I have some wonders about Adi as a reader. Her teachers have always reported that she is on grade level and that she reads fine in class. But at home, reading is always a struggle. I usually chalk it up to her stamina and being tired after school. After-school time is generally tricky for Adi…she uses up all her self-control at school and I’m grateful that she saves her loss of control for home.

Sometimes I think about how well I know the readers I get to work with at school. Our literacy team has been progress monitoring the decoding and encoding skills of all of our kindergarteners through second graders all year, and I can probably tell you the strengths and areas for growth for most of them. For many of these students, I also know what that transfer looks like in their reading and writing.

This makes me think about all that I don’t know about my own kids. For the most part, I’m fine with not knowing the nitty gritty. I know enough to know that they are progressing just fine. But when Adi reported her own progress based on her day at school, which I’m certain has inaccuracies, I just had to know for myself what was going on.

So Friday, I marched into the reading room at our school and announced, “I’m going to F&P my kids this weekend.” I know that my kids’ school uses a different benchmark system, so I knew I wasn’t jeopardizing their assessment process. I picked out an assessment for each of my kids, knowing that Adi might be a hard sell. The others would be more easy going and they might help me convince Adi to participate.

Fast forward to Friday evening, we were waiting for dinner to finish cooking. I threw out the idea of reading together and asked, “who wants to go first?” To my surprise, Adi volunteered.

We started with the oral reading portion. I was impressed with her ability to decode some of the trickier multisyllabic words. I noted that her pace was a little slow, but nothing a little more regular reading wouldn’t help improve.

As she read the rest of the story silently, I continued prepping dinner. When she announced she was done, I returned to have a conversation about her reading. I was, again, pleasantly surprised by her ability to answer some of the questions mostly because I had never talked to her about what she thought the author had done to keep her interested in her reading before.

“Did I pass?” Adi asked when we were done.

I told her how well she had done. I named the specific things she did well as a reader. Then we circled back to the area I thought she was ready to work on next. “I think you’re the kind of reader who is ready to think more about the lessons the characters are learning in their books.”

I felt better. My gut told me that Adi was just fine, but I had to be sure. If there was something truly challenging her, I wanted to make sure I could help support her at home. Turns out, we just need to continue working on building that love for reading.

Wren and Rose are already arguing over who gets to read with me first tomorrow. The latest fun activity sure to spice up any weekend.