Thick Description...running record

At the end of last week I completed a running record on my students using the sight word reader that contained some of the sight words they had been learning that week or had learned during word work. I did this one-on-one with each member of my focal group. We had previously echo read this book as a group during the week's lessons, highlighted the sight words from the books using highlighters, did choral reading, and the students read to a buddy. So, they had practiced reading this book three time prior to the running record. I color coded the running record and used the same copy of the book for each so I could keep track of each student in the same book. Jon's running record was color coded with the color yellow. Below is an example from that running record. Notice Jon read "eggs" for the word bacon and "bacon" for the word eggs. However, he correctly read the sight words, "I", "like", and "and".

I explained to Jon that he was going to read the book Foods I Like aloud to me and I was going to make some notes and follow along with him as he read. We were sitting alone at my U-table while other students were on the computer, working quietly doing seat work, or in another small group with my assistant. The room was fairly quiet, limiting the amount of distractions. He began by reading the title of the book and turned to the first page. The sentence said, "I like bacon and eggs." Jon read, "I like eggs and bacon." I reminded Jon to look at the beginning sound of the bacon. He correctly said, "It starts with /b/." I agreed and asked,"If it starts with /b/ then what in the picture begins with the /b/ sound?" He looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. I asked, "Point to the picture that begins with /b/." Jon quickly points to the bacon. "Great job! Now we know that word says bacon. So, what does this word say?" I pointed to the word "eggs". Jon looked at the picture for several seconds and said, "eggs". I asked him to then read that page one more time. He read it correctly and we turned the page. During most running records, I take note of their mistakes and do not correct them. However, since I am focusing on correctly reading sight words, making meaning from the text, and seeing how this connects to a balanced literacy approach, I felt like I needed to use this time as a teachable moment.

Jon continued on through each page very slowly. He read very choppy and did not use his finger to point to each word (this has been a major focus throughout the year). He looked at the pictures and noticed the pattern on each page. The pictures are shown in the order that they are written. For example, the text says, "I like cereal and toast." The pictures shown above the words show cereal first and toast second. As Jon was reading I noted that he had difficulty staying focused on each page. He often looked up and back down, and it took him over 5 minutes to read this story. I wanted to note these behaviors because they were different as compared to the other three students (two students were absent on this day). The other students read quickly, however, two of them had 1-2 miscues. The other students also did not pay as close as attention to the picture clues. Jon was very attentive to every picture, even putting his finger near the picture. All student read the sight words "I", "like", and "and" correctly without any miscues. This shows that they are able to recognize these sight words in text and not just in isolation. Even though Jon had two miscues on the first page, he read the rest of the book without any mistakes. However, it took him a much longer time to read each page. As we move on to more difficult books I am interested in seeing if his pace affects his ability to understand the text and as the sight words increase in difficulty, will this cause him problems?